On the face of the earth there is no one more beautiful than You
Wherever I go I wear your image in my heart
Whenever I fall in a despondent mood I remember your image
I met a woman at a party. Out of the blue she began to tell me about a baby dragon she had met in the woods..
oh dear, here we go..
She fed it and looked after it…
tonto…..
And then, when it was big enough she released it into back into the woods but villagers came up with sticks and clubs and beat it to death…
She burst into tears, asking between sobs…
‘What does a dragon mean?’
‘Do you see’, I replied gently, ‘how in a stroke you just beat it to death?’
She never thought to ask the dragon.
didna wear de image in her heart….
One of the main difficulties we have in finding a story to sustain us is that pretty much straight off we want to know what it ‘means’ and in the process rob ourselves of the soulful connection that first brought it to our attention.
We want to understand it rather than having a relationship with it out of which understanding might flow when it is good and ready.
We forget that stories and symbols which have the power to grab our attention also have their own life. So our wanting to know is like the discourtesy of rushing up to a person in the street and asking intrusively what they mean.
Our interaction with the Unconscious in the West is, as a rule, dismissive, arrogant and intrusive..
Like a swaggering king..
who wants to ‘understand’ stuff so that he can have power over it..
and kills it in the process of his dissection….
And my spirit rises a thousand fold
Your advent is the blossom time of the Universe
O Mother you have showered your choicest blessings upon me
With the loss of the Great Mother comes loss of the Principle of Relatedness. We lose sight of what is really important in life and wind up like king Gilgamesh, the first king of the first city, slayer of the Goddess Cybele, whose final act is the piteous praising of his city walls, his defended persona, rather than finding his true Self.
an’ so what about that? Him King!
Gilgamesh is an important figure because Western Civilisation has largely been built on the archetype of kingship and the ‘Madness of Ceasars’, the inflation that goes with it. Our belief in the myth of the ‘evolution of consciousness’ has to do, in part, with veiwing kingship as psychological progress and something to aspire to. This justifies the patriarchal spoiling which has occured as ‘necessary’, a bit like dropping atom bombs to ‘shorten the war’.
I believe, to the contrary, that the advent of kingship marks a period of regression in our culture, the beginning of a split reality in which the loss of the Principle of Relatedness means not only a diminishment of compassion for others but a loss of connection to self. Lets be cheeky and look at another of Gilgamesh’s dreams which seems to bear this out. I am indebted to M.L. von Franz for her insights into this dream and paraphrase her liberally in what follows.
”I am walking up and down proudly in front of my people. Stars are in the sky. One of the stars of the sky God Annu falls upon me. I try to lift it but it was too heavy. All of the Uruk assemble and kiss it’s feet.”
So, here we have ‘the ideal man’, the primal hero, dragon slayer…
‘the great individual who takes on the challenge of changing forces and powers’. (Baring and Cashford)
supposedly…
and yet he has a dream that quite clearly critisizes him for this ‘evolutionary’ step with which so much of academia would like to attribute him.
As king he has fullfilled some collective role, but not his uniqueness at all. He is crushed by the burden of following his own star which the people regard with greater favour than august kingship. Rather than have a relationship with that which comes from the heavens, he attributes himself with divinity and considers his role to be by divine appointment.
So him crushed..
If you don’t follow your star and opt for corporate life instead, your fate will come to you from outside…
and at high speed.
for want of re-membering..
Also remember me on the Day of Judgement
I don’t know if I will go to heaven or hell
But wherever I go, please always abide in me.
For the rest of us, the ‘not-kings’, waal we like this king arrangement preety much. We’ll sit on the sidelines..
wiv chips and Mountain Dew…..
while we watch in fascination while ol’ gilga try to wriggle free….
”This fascination leads to an infantile giving up of oneself and being flat on one’s belly worshiping ….the projection… ML von Franz.
so that peoples don’ have to make any effort themselves…
To find your story, to follow your star, ‘means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find a completely new way for yourself instead of the trodden path everyone else is running along.” ML von Franz.
And so it suits us to hand over our power to others so that they will also carry the projection of the Self and all the aggravation that goes with it despite the loss of relatedness entailed and our meagre substitution of ‘understanding’ stuff for immersion in the Waters of Life.
Poetry from the Koran.
