I’m writing a dictionary.

If a Scorpio isn’t creating, they’re destroying. These are two faces of the same archetype as creation itself destroys the moment. Every birth upsets reality by changing it. Every word created by every voice and every hand is a spell.

So many mouths are uninitiated in the old ways that kept us close to soul. I’ve grown sick of the soulless way people speak so I’m creating the cure—a dictionary that puts the soul of each word back into it.

Words have been hollowed out. I’ve met so many who think avoidance is sexy when it’s really a depressed shade of power. People who think aggression is actual power when it’s reactivity to touch in places that still hurt. Why is being gaslit so enraging? Because it’s loving a deep river who, when dry, pretends they have always been a trench. I’m writing a dictionary because somewhere along the way, the souls of words dropped right out the middle. Adulthood is the distance between someone’s voice and their mouth. This dictionary closes the gap.

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What is the name of the soul-thief of words? James Hillman says its nominalism—an intellectual force that attacks the reality of words. This thievery was spearheaded by Marin Mersenne during the 1600s, for 30 years, and informed so much of prevailing world views we still see reflected back to us in modern culture and the use of language. Hillman says nominalism has emptied out big words, that “there has been an accelerating decay of large, abstract, polyvalent ideas in favor of small, concrete, particular, single-meaning names…thus the soul came to distrust its speech of spiritual and imaginal realities.” This is a startling tragedy in our everyday lives. Our souls--they don’t trust language to carry them out into the world.

This will not do.

I started writing this dictionary years ago and came upon Re-visioning Psychology by James Hillman only in recent years. Another nod to the fact that my own soul brings me to the Jungians again and again. Hillman says nominalism “deprived big words of their sanity.” I felt this in my own soul. How many times I’ve tried to have a meaningful and important conversation with someone I’ve deeply cared for who didn’t know what they were talking about and what’s more, didn’t want to find out. How many times I’ve been vilified for asking them to retrieve their souls. A coward is someone who outruns a fire they started so quickly so as to look like a victim of it.

I’m writing a dictionary because I think about exactly what it is I mean when I speak, and I wish others would do the same. I’m writing a dictionary because I don’t use words to hide or to stay the same. I use them to wake up. I’m writing a dictionary because I know there are others like me who see the soul in each word and feel just as lonely as I have felt and because being the way I am has been a solitary road, a taboo for folks to dip into before returning to their soulless lives dependent on empty pseudo-erotic stupid games that win stupid prizes. I’m writing this dictionary because I refuse to allow their desecration of language to dictate the meaning of words in my own hands.

Fate is a prisoner to familiarity, and I am becoming familiar with the soul of each word. Each definition is a poem because a poem is the pulp of an echo and I’m singing the ancient song of soul. A poem tells more of the truth than the rest of the story ever could, and I am nothing if not a storyteller.

Psychologically speaking, nominalism is seen in the way we have a restrictive view of reality—egos and objects. Most reject the ambiguous and metaphorical or see the carriers of these soulful modes of being as naïve or unproductive. It wasn’t always this way. During the 14^th century Renaissance, metaphor was alive and well in alchemy, astrology, poetry and so many other world views. Mersenne put a stop to this in such a prolific way, one might almost admire his devotion if he weren’t devoted to emptiness.

Today, metaphor and soul are granted free reign in poetry, art, the occult, dream work and psychosis. The fringes. Psychology itself, based on the word soul, doesn’t use it. We either talk of ego or Self. Metaphor is often limited to how useful it is in investigating a diagnosis. Even the use of the word “soulmate” has fallen out of favor. Hillman says, “Both the world out there and in here have gone through the same process of depersonification. We have all been de-souled…Personifying is a way of soul-making.” This dictionary is an act of soul-making.

Am I angry about the bold yet empty way people speak? Am I angry about why? I am enraged. You might say rage is clinching their most arrogant demons’ windpipe between my fingernails and whispering into their gaping mouth, you have woken the old testament god. You might say the antonym to rage is laughter. You might say laughter is feeling safe in your own mouth.

Mersenne was “the center of the European learned world, always attacking the ‘magical’ early Renaissance in order to further the ‘mechanical’ later Renaissance.” I’m calling for a new Renaissance of the English language. A slowing down of the tongue. A pursuit of the ripest words with the truest meanings to empower a sustained soulful mode of consciousness. I’ve been called a renaissance woman more times than I can count and I declare it time. Mersenne doesn’t have shit on me. Roll in your grave, soul-thief.

You might say the English language doesn’t have a soul. I say, everything has a soul and a soul doesn’t die. I’m finding it and I’m putting it back in. Because I am a poet. Because I am tired of pretending the dissociated way people talk is interesting. Because fuck that. Nonchalance is a boring lie. You know what else is a lie? Shame. It’s a zip-tied prayer, fingers cramped from pointing in the wrong direction.

Hillman says,

“A more generalized result of nominalism is ‘logophobia,’ a dread of words, especially of big words which might harbor irrealities. Our difficulty with the word archetype and with envisioning the reality of archetypal images and ideas is one of the effects of nominalism. We are in a peculiar double bind with words; they fascinate and at the same time repel. For because of nominalism, words have become both bloated in importance and dried in content.”

Not anymore. On the one hand, we ought to fear empty words and on another we ought to ensoul them and then work through the fear of soul. He goes on to reiterate, there is a credibility gap in that we don’t trust words as true carriers of meaning. So what are these bloated dry words for, then? To mislead ourselves and others? I think the fuck not.

One of my favorite moments with Hillman: “A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the words—and angel means originally ‘message-bearer’—how can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?” It cannot. Enter modern day alienation.

We often feel lonely around people because we are unconsciously faced with just how alienated we all are from our own deeper truths, our own souls. Being around others can often be taxing because we can feel the loneliness of their souls alongside our own and words cannot yet bridge the gap, empty and crusty as they are, they widen it.

Hillman says, “We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people.” Words are sacred and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let a terrified white man from the 1600s have this much say in my mouth. And yours. I am doing my part in erasing his life’s work in waging war against soul for the masses. I realize he was a mathematician and I also do not care.

On a deeper level, nominalism is actually a psychic defense against what words trigger in us. When using or hearing words like love, trust, betrayal, truth, we can sense all the painful memories attached to them and relentlessly shrink ourselves and the words down to bare minimums to avoid engaging with the complexes they awaken in us. Ensouling words is facing the state of them in our own psyche’s—our own souls.

My wish is that we all start to care more about the state of our souls in our mouths than we do our fears, and a wish is the shiniest scar I’ve ever seen. A scar is the only thick skin to learn anything from. So here I am. Listening to myself the way a locket listens for a secret to hold and sharing it as an act of love because love is a door to where your ghosts are alive again and you can talk them out of dying. It’s the only known way to time travel. If a daydream is a love letter from time, this dictionary is a gift to the soul of time, synchronicity.

I hope you’ll join me as I share this dictionary as I write it. It will be available to paid subscribers. I hope it finds you right when you need it and I hope, if you’re like me, you find some peace in knowing, somewhere not too far away, words are being ensouled. To love is to alchemize. I once had a dream someone lit me on fire and watched me beg. They called it dancing. My skin grew back softer. Less cold.

Hillman quotes Miguel de Unamuno, 1864,
“In order to love everything…human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, love personalizes…we only love that which is like ourselves…it is love itself…that reveals the resemblances to us…love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.”

This is me loving the vessels that carry soul between us—words. This is me making words a safe place to live. Safety is fertile soil. May these definitions find parts of you still living that were put in body bags. May your skin grow back softer, less cold. May your soul find the soil in every word.