SPIRITUAL SOAP: Weird & Güd - Headless Saints & Ego-Filled Heads

Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!

Weird & Güd is the joining of my 2 best useless qualities — hypercriticism & rabbit-hole-style research — into something useful: recommendations and fascinations neatly packaged together for you every week. No hermeticism required.

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St. Denis taking his severed head for a walk — and you thought your ex was petty. (1896)

The Weird

• Cephalophore - a term specifically reserved for a decapitated saint carrying their own head. Lots of beheading was going on during the time of saints. Now we have no saints but also fewer beheadings. To be fair, you’ve gotta be pretty self-righteous to accept the title of saint, so I can see how some people might get tired of you (edit: I do not endorse beheadings). Annoying as saintliness might be, carrying your own severed head back to your church is not only rightly righteous but metal as hell.

The Güd

• Loevinger’s Stages of Ego Development - you’ve heard of Freud’s ego, id, and superego, but you’ve probably never heard of Loevinger’s nuanced stages of ego development. These stages are akin to Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development where an individual must overcome challenges at different points in life (Trust vs. Mistrust being the first stage).
  
  There are 9 stages, starting from the ego-less Pre-Social Stage of infancy and developing on until reaching the Integrated Stage which is basically a psychologist’s definition of enlightenment — wisdom, ability to let go of the unsolvable and unattainable, and making peace with your inner hell. Loevinger bleakly predicted that this stage is reached by less than 1% of people. Most of us exist somewhere between the 4th-6th stages. The 6th, the Conscientious Stage, is basically just becoming less of an asshole — considering how you impact other people, holding long-term goals for yourself, and using self-reflection to consider the world in more complex ways.
  
  If you’re at the 6th and trying to move to the 7th, you’ll need to confront your inner contradictions and place more emphasis on the way you act within relationships, not just on having relationships. This stage is where the shit hits the fan but you value it because you had no idea there was so much shit to hit the fan in the first place.
  
  Here’s a weird lo-fi website with more details on each stage because I’d rather link you to a website called The Mouse Trap than Wikipedia and we both know neither of us is going to read an entire psych journal report. Check your ego.

Jane Loevinger — born in 1918, told her best chance at being a psychologist was to marry one. All the ego science goodness, none of the weird phallic shit. Thanks Jane.

I hope this makes your week a little weirder and a little güder. Now go forth, be weird, and above all, be güd.

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