Gossip reminds us that to be human is to be messy. Perhaps that is why we love it so.
A neighbor’s affair or a coworker’s sudden departure can quickly become a modern-day Greek myth. There is a particular kind of thrill in spilling the tea with someone who hasn’t heard it before, and thereby keeping the myth going. Scandals and drama in celebrity lives quickly go viral for similar reasons (fun fact: I subscribe to the delightful Sports Gossip podcast and without fail will listen to the segments when the gals talk about the latest Aaron Rodgers drama).
According to James Hillman, gossip is the “psychic ballast of human dirt” that keeps us anchored to the earth instead of floating away into rigid, sanitized spiritualities:
Something psychological is going on in our craving for tales of souls in a mess. Such tales express the psyche’s myth-making function at the personal level of storytelling, tale-tattling. When the psychologist disregards gossip, he may be sailing too high, off into the superiorities of the spirit. Gossip provides the psychic ballast of human dirt that keeps us down to earthly involvement (p. 26, The Myth of Analysis).
It’s now Gemini season, and while pop astrology often reduces this sign to superficial chatter, its archetypal roots run much deeper. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, the Roman counterpart to Hermes. As the psychopomp, Hermes’ primary job was to navigate thresholds by carrying messages back and forth from the upper and lower worlds, bridging the lofty spirit and the heavy underworld.
In her book You Didn’t Hear This From Me, Kelsey McKinney points out that at its most basic, gossip is simply “one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present.” By that definition, a prayer request or speculation about where a baseball player will sign is gossip. It is an essential part of being human. “What is gossip,” McKinney asks, “if not a way to decipher the world around us?” Gossip is Hermetic medicine; it provides that necessary psychic ballast.
Historically, a gossip was a “god-sibling”—someone bound to you by spiritual affinity who was present at threshold moments such as baptism and childbirth. In The Moon and the Virgin, Jungian analyst Nor Hall links gossip to the Sibyls—the ancient prophetesses. It was an unvarnished truth-telling that bypassed patriarchal structures. She writes:
An old Midwestern mother of poetry once told me that words have two uses: the first is for analysis and the second is ‘to heat and move you.’ When asked how to go about getting in on this second aspect of language she said to go and listen to the rhythm of country gossip. Gossip is worth listening to: it means ‘god speaking through a woman‘ (p. 189).
But as power structures centralized, those closed-door conversations among women became a threat. McKinney traces how god-sibb evolved from a title of deep emotional intimacy to a weaponized verb used to police discourse.
There are times when refusing to listen to gossip in a fit of piety commits harm. McKinney describes how, in religious communities, “the codifying of gossip as a sin could be used as a shield for misbehaving men in power to subjugate women in their congregations.” When the head pastor of her childhood church had an affair, the immediate shutdown of the “gossip mill” under the guise of spiritual righteousness was actually an explicit tactic to maintain the power dynamic of the organization.
In other words, what we dismiss as “idle chatter” is often the whispered survival network of the marginalized. As McKinney notes, author bell hooks observed that gossip has historically been the only social interaction where women felt safe to state what they really think and feel, rather than what pleases the listener. Far from being an avoidance of truth, gossip is a collective, messy search for it.
Pass it on.
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Anita Ashland
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