Suffering and transcendence in African American blues music
The Blues-man or Blues-woman, far from being a simple entertainer, provides a similar social and cultural role to the shaman or preacher. Rather than being an intermediary between the world of man and God (or in Jungian parlance, the ego and Self), he or she often fulfils the role of psychopomp, guiding the audience through a descent into the body and the realm of the lived experience of human suffering. Paradoxically, it’s this chthonic descent into the shadow that creates the possibility of an enantiodromia – the psycho-spiritual emergence of its opposite, a transcendence.
Join us for a series of seven lectures presented by a faculty of scholars and musicians from diverse disciplines as they take us on a journey into the Blues, with it’s roots in African American suffering and it’s intersection with spiritual themes. This is more than just a lecture series, it’s an invitation to meet your own shadow’s transformative potential in a way that only the Blues invokes, through a soulful and embodied felt sense.