Unheimlich Maneuvers: an excerpt from The White Deer, by Melinda Reidinger
The following is an abridged excerpt of a chapter from Melinda Reidinger’s upcoming release, The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic. You can also read this excerpt with its footnotes as a downloadable PDF.
The White Deer releases in multiple print and digital editions into the world 1 March, 2022. The full-color editions (deluxe hardback and the standard paperback), featuring the illustration work of James Hutton, are now available for pre-order at a rate 20% less than their retail price. Find out more at the end of this excerpt, or follow this link for the pre-order page.
Unheimlich Maneuvers
In The Structural Study of Myth (1955), Claude Levi-Strauss proclaimed: “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolution,” and the stories we are examining mediate a resolution of the relationship between humans and the land. Also, this theme finds expression in the relationship between a powerful king and the welfare of his people, which I’ll explore further in the chapter on Loathly Ladies.
The resolution between humans (or their leaders) and the landscape is found in the realization that the two are intrinsically woven together. It is precisely a lack of awareness of this state of affairs that provides space for dramatic tension in a narrative before the two elements are reconciled—as we saw in the tale of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnelle. This ambiguous, liminal space of unawareness is where subtle messages are sent and received.
Of course, ideas or individual and collective fantasies about animals tell us much about ourselves and the relationships we try to have with these creature. However, they can also reflect broader realities that aren’t so easily accessible in our ordinary states of mind. Joseph Dodds puts it like this: “it is likely that on at least some level the animal ambassadors in our patients’ dreams reflect the effects of the ecological crisis, as the ‘hyperobject’ of climate change impacts our minds, individually and collectively.”
While any animal might be the bearer of an ecological message when it is read with a mythic mindset. In particular, the unexpected appearance of deer often heralds a parting of a veil between the sensed and the intuited, as well as the the individual and the ecological. I have already discussed the otherworldly symbolism of the color white, and illustrated the curses and taboos with which the figure of the white deer is hedged. I have also discussed the evolution of today’s term “monster” from portentous beasts and, even earlier, from our own minds. In an earlier part of the book I suggested that part of the reason deer are associated with the dead and ancestral lore may be that, thanks to the longevity of hunting tales, deer have long been associated with ancient lifestyles. This means that when a deer—in particular one that is white—unexpectedly appears, it can be interpreted as a symbol of something extraordinary that has faded from our world, and it seems to present an invitation to take on a perilous quest. The person who encounters the animal may have a feeling of being in the presence of something both disturbingly alien and all too familiar, which is what psychologists call the “uncanny.”
The Uncanny and the Unheimlich
The concept of the uncanny was most famously developed by Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical tradition, and it has been adopted into literary scholarship for analyzing works that deal with fear, horror, the supernatural, and the general themes belonging to Gothic and fantastical genres. In Freud’s classic 1919 treatise on the uncanny (unheimlich in German), he first discusses the contemporary definition of heimlich (native, familiar, and domestic), and then he refers to Daniel Sanders’ 1860 dictionary of the German language, which provides some of the older definitions of heimlich that had become obsolete. Previously, in addition to the connotations of the family and the home, heimlich also referred to domestic or tamed animals. Bearing the latter definition in mind, it is clear that the sudden and unexpected appearance of a deer is much more unheimlich than the sudden appearance of, for instance, an escaped sheep.
What does this feel like? With a poet’s knack of dreaming while he is awake and sharing the vision, Ted Hughes’ 1973 poem titled “Roe Deer” seems a late echo of the theme of a sacred messenger’s irruption into the contemporary world (even if the message is no longer entirely legible): the recipient knows that he has been called, but doesn’t know how to respond. Hughes is traveling along a road “in the dawn-dirty light,” a liminal time of day, and it was additionally during “the biggest snow of the year.” The big flakes swirling around seem to create conditions where objects and their surroundings disintegrate in “all ways.” Two darkly silhouetted deer suddenly appear: “They happened into my dimension / The moment I was arriving just there.”
Why wasn’t Hughes in his own dimension just before the deer came into view? Perhaps he had been distracted by thoughts or memories, and the unexpected appearance of the animals in the road before him brought him back to presence in his body and the place itself. It felt to Hughes as if the deer were there seeking him, expecting him to “remember some password or sign.” Every element present (deer, trees, the poet himself) was no longer what it was supposed to be: everything was both “disintegrating” and full of potential. However, it was just a fleeting moment, and the the "dawn inspiration” that had drawn the veil between this sensitive and open awareness and a more ordinary one was closed again by snow, and mundane reality was reasserted.
Something was extraordinary about the deer’s appearance during the “biggest snow of the year” and about the haunting way they regarded him. Recalling Baudelaire, this is a man approaching Nature through forests filled with symbols observing him, communicating by means that can seem equally clear and obscure. Something opened up here between the poet and the deer. Hughes doesn’t say just what it is, but this sudden flash of awareness of a sentience in which he, the deer, and possibly some broader field participate seemed to be the revelation.
When what we take for “ordinary” conditions disintegrate, this potential can be revealed.
I, too, once had an uncanny experience with an apparition of a deer on a dark evening in November when the trees were bare of leaves. I was driving my children home from a nearby village where we had been visiting friends and had just rounded a very dangerous bend in the road. For some reason, my eyes drifted upwards to where the trees’ naked branches met over the road, and I was surprised to see what looked like the head of a stag clearly outlined by the branches, with a kind of a wreath around it.
I hit the brakes to get a better look at this unusual sight, and just at that moment a magnificent stag of flesh and blood leapt out of the shrubbery on the right. It passed directly in front of my car and bounded to the other side. Had I not seen the uncanny vision and braked for it, we would have had a painful and possibly fatal collision with the animal. I drive along this road nearly every day and have looked above the road many times for the shape of a stag’s head in the branches, but I have never seen it again. The most restrained interpretive framework is that there was a connection between my unconscious mind and the deadly danger in the immediate environment: my brain needed to see a legible symbol in order to justify the reflexive action of smashing down the brake pedal. I suspect there is more to this.
The Heimlich and Unheimlich
Returning to the discussion of Freud’s pair of terms, it is very curious that heimlich was also used sometimes to refer to things that are secret or concealed, such a clandestine love affair, and the “heimlich art” was magic. That is: folk magic and charms, not church magic or formal ceremonial magic. Heimlich thus gives the impression of a contronym: a word that has exactly opposite meanings, because it refers both to “that which is familiar and congenial, and … that which is concealed and kept out of sight.” Freud comments:
“Unheimlich is only used customarily, we are told, as the contrary of the first signification [i.e., the domestic, familiar, and cozy], and not of the second [that which is hidden] … we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the ‘uncanny,’ one which we had certainly not awaited. According to him, everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.”
He then cites the entry from Grimm’s dictionary that states that unheimlich means free from ghostly influences and arrives at the crux of the paradox: “Thus, heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.” So rather than being a true contronym, we see that heimlich is so capacious that it contains its opposite, which is only partially concealed, or rather “estranged” through the process of repression.
Timothy Morton applies a similar nested understanding of the concepts of heimlich and unheimlich when he states that the most familiar places seem to have the deepest secrets. Many genres of literature and film (including Gothic, horror and folk horror, mystery, and other related styles) use tropes of people who are drawn into events that cause them to look deeper into the hidden aspects of a place which seems tranquil but conceals dark secrets. However, ecological awareness—as such—is dark-uncanny, or weird: “it has a twisted, looping form,” because there is always so much that we are unaware of right where we are, no matter where that is.
How capacious is our home—I mean, in the broadest possible sense of the world that everyone calls home? As I already discussed in a footnote in “Paradoxes of the Rape Metaphor,” the word ecology was coined by Ernst Haeckel from the Greek oikos (house, household) and logia (discourse). However, the term ecology contains a fundamental ambivalence: is it the logos of oikos (meaning the logical system of the environment) or the oikos of logos (the house that embraces human logic, or the intellectual system)? As Pierre Madl points out, “the former assumes a human rational and logical imposition on the universe, while the latter suggests human acceptance of the universe as the way it operates.”
The relevance of psychoanalytic modelling to understanding ecology is particularly evident in the case of “elemental catastrophes” (i.e., floods, epidemics, etc.), because this tradition habitually views mind and environment as looped or intertwined. The Scientific Revolution crowned us with victory prematurely. We believed that we would no longer be at Nature’s whim, at the mercy of plagues, droughts and failed harvests, or catastrophic storms and fires—and we no longer ascribed them to Divine whims or punishments. We believed that if we understood the causes of these events through science, we could manipulate them through technology and help more people survive and prosper.
As I wrote before in the context of pandemics, people show very little ability or even willingness to grapple with natural disasters. Such disasters are often ignored in historical retrospection and only rarely memorialized. We prefer clear narratives with victors and heroes in them: protagonists, not mass villains or mass victims. But Nature doesn’t provide these: “Nature is both reassuring and terrifying, an ambivalent, uncanny terrain. Thought and earth move together, become destabilized, flow and erupt.” As participants in a force of nature, we are terrifyingly depersonalized.
Psychoanalytical theory and Timothy Morton’s Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) both allow space for the dance between symbols, mind(s), and reality. There can be no banishing of a certain magical principle: reality is always-already both mysterious and magical, “because beings withdraw and because beings influence each other aesthetically, which is to say at a distance.” The thrill of meeting an uncanny apparition is like the chill that runs down our spine when, as the folk tradition has it, “someone is walking on our grave.” This is because the uncanny arises as an effect when the boundaries we have set “between human and nonhuman, and living and dead, are threatened, blurred, or erased.” The apparition of a vulnerable, mutant deer that stands out brightly and distinctly from its surroundings is a reminder of the vulnerable seams between what Félix Guattari calls the “three ecologies of mind, nature, and society, with flows and feedbacks circulating and undulating between human and nonhuman, semiotic and material, individual and collective, organic and technological, living, and non-living.”
Paradoxically, it is irrational dreams or uncanny (unheimlich) visions that bring us into an expanded realm of the heimisch, the known-and-familiar. This process does not take place through habituation (because such apparitions are rare), but through an inspired resolution of the tension between the artificially separated pair. It’s a mediation between psyche, symbol, and the other beings with whom we share space, and it occurs in a way the constitutes worlds: territories and relationships between independent—yet interconnected—beings contained within them.
Expanding Our Awareness
How does an expanded ecological awareness arise? In Hughes’ poetic vision, it was the “disintegration” effect of snow that blurred the boundaries between the commonplace and the extraordinary. Such an awareness can also foster practical realization; for example, in the case of my encounter with the stag that leapt into the road in front of my car, it was evident that people’s roads are impinging on the deer’s territory, and not the other way around. An expanded ecological awareness can also create a deep, loving connection to the land and inspire commitment to serve it, and the many beings with whom we share and co-create place.
At times, divisions between the world of physical objects that move in space, and deeper, underlying powers or realities can seem very clearly defined; however, our experiences in dreams show us that they are not necessarily so distant. For this reason, people have long attempted to cultivate dreams that would bring wisdom either in symbolic form or through contact with gods or spirits able to communicate with the unconscious mind.
The ancient Elysian oracles involved white stags in their myths and symbolism, using them to solicit supernatural guidance. This is evidenced by Brut the Trojan’s account of visiting the Island of Leogrecia, where he received a moon-oracle message while sleeping on a newly-flayed hide of a white hart whose blood had been poured on the sacrificial fire. Fortunately, such practices are not required: images, symbols, and metaphors can appear spontaneously, or when cultivated by more humane methods, such as meditating on a particular image or a verse before drifting off to sleep, or learning trance, “journeying,” or lucid dreaming techniques. Sometimes, the symbol is a living animal. If its appearance is unexpected and seems numinous, it can facilitate a flash recognition that something has come bearing a message. The next important thing is to interpret it.
Humans actually have a powerful ability to transmit and receive symbolic messages: it is simply one of our faculties, such as walking, swimming, or singing. This may come more easily to some than to others, but it is hardly the preserve of specialists (e.g., shamans, psychoanalysts, professional artists). This is a skill that can be trained through attention to all forms of what Briana Saussy calls the sacred arts, which include: stories, poetry, visual and media arts, live performances and rituals of every kind. In his originally unpublished notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche called the drive toward the formation of metaphors “the most fundamental human drive.” However, he thought of this mental function as a kind of irrationality that is suppressed by rational, truth-seeking acts and concept formation, which “finds its discharge in myth and art.” This drive “continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams.”
This libidinous metaphor-making impulse is embedded in language just as much as in the mind, and is not only pleasurable but also very functional. Philosopher Owen Barfield observed that, contrary to what many would expect, metaphor conveys more aliveness and allows for more meanings to emerge than literal descriptions. “The fact that it does not work like this says something important about metaphors—that they might be powerful transformational enchantments … and something even more important about the universe in general: if ‘aliveness’ encapsulates it better, then the whole thing is probably alive.”
Meanings can be multivalent, shifty, and tied to personal stories and interpretations, which is all the more reason to see them as messages that come from a living matrix. When associations are too rote (long things = penises for the Freudians; something dark is a “shadow” for Jungians; a white chicken feather that falls across your path is an angelic message for New Age Christians), it can be a sign of the recipient not looking closely enough at the context of what is being presented. This reduces the agency and power of who ever or whatever may be trying to communicate something, a message imbued with more transformative power than a few schemes or stories we’ve already memorized and look for.
Not seeing beyond ourselves can also hamper our ability to heal. As shamanic practitioner and medical anthropologist Alberto Villodo has pointed out, we never heal ourselves from within our own stories.14 There needs to be an element or motif that emerges from a larger field, one we were not aware of, and whose appearance or transformation surprises us.
Meaning-making through metaphors is also omnipresent in folk stories, myths, and classic fairy tales. Many have criticized the popular fairy tales over the past half century for the focus on marriage as a goal or end state for young female characters, which is entirely justified from a social perspective. Stories for young people where the relationship patterns are more diverse have been welcomed by parents and others who are tired of the old “princess bride” monoculture for girls. However, as philosophy writer Wes Alwan points out, the traditional psychological conception of libido is far more all-embracing and all-pervading than romantic love, and it deserves to be recognized as a force that, paradoxically, roots a person more firmly in reality.
While Nietzsche thought making metaphors was a fundamental drive, Freud saw libido as the first impulse which precedes the act of metaphor-making. In dreams and fantasies, “certain ideas or images become imbued with meaning and emotional resonance,” because libido has become attached to them. However, it soon meets with obstacles that are either imposed by reality or by conscience, which makes it “jump, associatively, from one idea to another like it (metaphor) or to another contiguous with it (metonymy).”
However, it is not only what we want that changes: because we can’t always get what we want, or at least not right away, libido must work on the psyche itself. We therefore “alter ourselves to the extent that we can’t alter the world according to our wishes. It is the history of our particular course of love that tells us how and why we became who we are. Love is character.” A popular rendering of this idea is found in the quote “What you get by reaching your goals is not nearly so important as what you become by reaching them.” Who is the author of this nugget of wisdom that is often cited in self-help memes and even in books? Attributions include Henry David Thoreau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but the real source seems to be the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. The idea conveyed in this formulation has escaped its pedigree and established itself as a piece of feral folklore with the borrowed haloes of intellectual heroes. And that’s wonderful: the camouflage allows it to thrive and proliferate.
One of the most courageous responses to fear—be that fear of the unknown, fear of an uncanny blending of conditions and categories, or fear of anything else—is to reach out with love and to be open to receiving it. A love which is not mere sentiment or possessive attachment, but an active process of creative engagement. This isn’t just being open to reading symbols or receiving “messages”—it’s a merging with the field in which messages are transmitted. That love of the world around us may be innate, as I will discuss in the context of Edward O. Wilson’s “biophilia hypothesis” in a subsequent chapter. As Sophie Strand so eloquently describes in her essay “Make It A Love Story,” an ecstatic eroticism is all-pervasive in the living world:
The forest is densely particulate – with mildew, with spores, with mothdust from wing beats, with water molecules, with slow ropes of sunlight strained and frayed through the pine needles. A ghost pipe glistens against the shadows, still in curled supplication to the Russala mycelia that feeds her spectral body. Nearby the underground fungi of the Russala fruits: the waxy red mushroom wears a hat of bleached leaves it has pushed up from under. I think of the “parasitic relationship” between the ghost pipe and its fungal partner. I think of all the strands of mycelium pooling and looping below my feet. Kissing into elm trees. Sucking in sugar and dispensing minerals. Always hand holding. Always interrogative, inter-species, constituting a lovemaking that doesn’t strictly belong to just the fungi or plants or trees or bacteria involved.
When a being that is constituted by a mutualism mates with another being constituted by a mutualism how many beings are making love? How many species create a reproductive event? … The world is plush with love. Anarchic love that wears no face. Love that bites and pricks and explodes morphologies. Love that turns our own bodies into a meshwork of molecular eroticisms. Love that needs no nuclear couple … Sometimes you have to write yourself into another body. An ecosystem of bodies … I have not been inside a love story. I have been a love story: my very body a clamorous, complicated interplay of beings disagreeing, singing, swooning, and melting together. I don’t know where the love goes. But I know that every time I breathe out, it overflows.
If we are mentally predisposed to love and take pleasure in participating in the world through our senses, the blocks imposed on this are cultural, which means they are mutable. And the dysfunctions experienced when individuals or cultures are prevented from immediate engagement can therefore be healed.
For more information about The White Deer, see below:
The White Deer: Ecospirituality & The Mythic,
by Melinda Reidinger
Release Date 1 March, 2024
In ancient myths from throughout the world, the appearance of a white deer presages a warning, leads humans to crucial crossroads, and points us to a gate to better understanding our our relationship to the world. Also, throughout history and in science, the white deer has been a sign of imbalance, impending peril, and also profound moments of opening and transformation.
In The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, Melinda Reidinger chases the white deer down mythic paths and startling (and sometimes shocking) tracks. From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the blue blood of horseshoe crabs, “monstrous” ladies and fallen knights to Magyar star-myths and desert forests, The White Deer speaks to a relationship with the living world we’ve forgotten but can learn to find again.
Deeply researched and densely rich with details from science, history, myth, and dream, and written with a warmly engaging voice, Melinda Reidinger’s opus also features the haunting interior illustration work of James Hutton and a foreword by Gordon White.
Specifications
The White Deer—a crucial reference and a deeply inspiring tome—will be published in multiple editions including Ritona’s first hardback edition.
Deluxe (hardcover): 6.14 inches x 9.21 inches (Royal), full color with images on 70lb paper, 290 pages, matte dust jacket, digital cloth.
Standard (paperback): 6.14 inches x 9.21 inches (Royal), full color with images on 70lb paper, 290 pages, perfectbound with matte cover
Ordering Information
The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic by Melinda Reidinger released to the world 1 March, 2023. Deluxe (hardcover) editions retail for $37.50 US and Standard (paperback) editions for $22.50 US.
In addition to single edition sales, The White Deer is offered as part of two packages. These allow readers to purchase several related books together for greatly reduced prices.
Deluxe (hardcover) release package:
Includes The White Deer by Melinda Reidinger as well as The Dead Hermes Epistolary by Slippery Elm and True To The Earth: Pagan Political Theology by Kadmus. The cost of this package is 55.00 (save 12.50: these books together retail normally for 67.50).
Standard (paperback) release package:
Includes The White Deer by Melinda Reidinger as well as The Dead Hermes Epistolary by Slippery Elm, True To The Earth: Pagan Political Theology by Kadmus, and Courting The Wild Queen by Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue . The cost of this package is 55.00 (save 13.50: these books together retail for 68.50.
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