The Jealous King.

There was once a king who would not allow his daughter to marry. He kept her shut up in his castle and turned all her suitors away. One fine day she asked him pretty please and since it was indeed such a fine day, if she could not walk briefly in the meadow below the castle walls? Eventually the King agreed but warned her not to go too far… lest some harm come to her.

The Princess walks out into the meadow and there she finds a young man who is sooo handsome she immediately falls in love. He is, of course, a Prince from a neighboring kingdom. Each return to their respective fathers saying they want to get married. The Jealous King flies into a rage, closes the castle gates and challenges the young Prince to lay siege to his walls if he wishes.. which is just what he does. After a while the Prince realizes the castle is empty, everyone has escaped through underground passages. Only the King and Princess remain. The King implores his daughter’s obedience but she refuses and in a fury he casts a terrible spell upon her which turns her into three animals; a rabbit, a lion and a dragon.

The Prince searches high and low for the Princess but to no avail. Nothing but pesky and somewhat dangerous creatures. In despair he sends his troops home, continuing to search alone. In a nearby wood he comes across an Ancient Crone who tells him the secret of the King’s curse. He must return to the castle and find the animals, kissing each one three times.

At their wedding feast the Old King is included on the guest list, though further down the table than he might have liked.

This subversion of the Princess by the Jealous King can be looked at a number of different ways. One way to view this story is at face value, as an allegory for current events, a good example being the recent claim of harassment, false imprisonment and illegal gagging orders made against American virologist Dr Mikovits at the bequest of King Fauci who had other ideas about what should become of her HIV research, all of which then escalated into spell casting tsunamis of propaganda against her, millions spent on silencing something…

which could not possibly be.

Er, I thought Fauci was the good guy?

It depends on who your standing next to on the podium, can we continue?

of course..

Another way of looking at this story is to imagine that all the characters and interactions are parts of oneself. Fairy tales and myths are public dreams which, like dreams, can be seen as both describing outer events in an allegorical way but also as an emerging outcrop of consciousness from within. The problem with approaching either dream or fairy story from this subjective point of view, where all the characters and events are given the slant of an entirely inner pageant, is that you are then denied the luxury of projection upon which so much interaction and internal cohesion depend. The symbols involved can no longer be regarded as some quaint matter simply for other folk’s consideration. They not only have to do with us but act upon us.

‘The individual is then faced with the task of putting down to his own account all the iniquity, devilry, etc. which he has blandly attributed to others and about which he has been indignant all his life.” CG Jung

Given the understandable resistances involved, what might it mean that the inner king has imprisoned fair maid and cast this divisive spell? Could the metaphors involved refer to some crucial psychological dynamic within the individuation process? If so, what might that be?

The problem with growth and change is that it shakes previously sturdy self-constructs and leaves behind the familiarity of old ways of being. You have to suck at something new, trade in your old strategies and values for others as yet untested. This is why initiatory thresholds and transformations of any kind are generally difficult and unpleasant, necessitating much merrymaking to compensate the dread. They often require ritual, observance and loads of relatives to contain the transition which involves a process dubbed ‘de-integration’ by analyst Michael Fordham; you get pulled apart but not to pieces.

Not everything in the psyche is going to be happy about this. The instinct for self preservation wants to prop up the old structure, even if it does not serve the impulse to growth with which it is then bound to clash. This is why support for Trump increased at the beginning of the Corona virus outbreak in America despite his utterly incompetent handling of the situation. The Devil you know is safer than the angel you do not.

..’and so I keep down my heart and swallow the call-note of depth dark sobbing.’ R.M Rilke

The Jealous King is the ‘old outmoded dispensation’ in the psyche, the dominant function for a particular stage of life which has served its part and become redundant as a way forward, the alchemical calcinatio where the soul feels dried out and dusty, where no more marrow can be sucked from your situation.

Such circumstances provoke crisis. The wheel of life has turned but not found new expression, the tools and strategies of yesteryear no longer adequate for today’s challenges. And yet despite this we all tend to drag our feet and hang on to old structures, sabotaging potential and silencing emerging consciousness.

‘Instinctive forces does not reason. They assume from the immense experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve best to be stabilized according to initial experience, most commonly [among] those whose strong need for a maternal figure has followed them into middle age.’ J Liedloff

Fortunately, love and life find a way. The new shoot eventually manages to squeeze past the psyche’s defenses, often by virtue of a chance encounter or some seemingly insignificant event which then catalyses change, though not without bitter conflict and feeling besieged by the very flood of energy you have been hoping for.

Finally, the threatened dominant function, walled in but without the usual resources at its disposal, resorts to dissociative tactics, a spell which divides and incapacitates. For a while the new form of life seems desperately imperiled or at least at sixes and sevens.

‘The integration of contents that were unconscious and projected involves a serious lesion of the ego… a decomposition of the elements indicating dissociation and collapse of existing ego structures,.. closely analogous to schizophrenia.’ C G Jung.

Not much fun. Our story seems to be suggesting that the process of becoming more conscious involves considerable inner conflict and suffering which can decommission ‘normal’ functioning.

‘The energies and attention of the individual are often so engrossed that the power of coping with normal life may be impaired.’ R. Assagioli.

There is a real risk that emerging consciousness cannot be integrated. Fortunately, the Ancient Crone makes an appearance just at the moment of despair and tells the Prince what to do. She is Old Mother Earth, the Principle of Co-operation and Relatedness, a power deeper and more potent than that of the King. She understands not only the malady but also the cure, the fragmented potential has to be loved back to wholeness, the scary lion and the terrifying dragon along with the sweet bunny. If the Princess can be loved in her totality, warts and all, there will be transformation. The Jealous King doesn’t have to be killed, just deposed. He can even go to the wedding feast so long as he accepts a lesser place at the table.

The Lure of Automatic Pilot.

Pizza Hut have bought out a trainer. Embossed on the tongue of the shoe is a button that you can press to order pizza. It sends out a GPS location to your nearest convenient franchise and..

boom..

pepperoni at your fingertips.

In Greek mythology the magical shoes were Hermes department. He had a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to pass between Olympus and the Mortal Plane. The magical shoes mediated between worlds just as they did for Dorothy in her travels between Kansas and Oz.

Very handy.

The capacity to mediate between worlds with enchanted footwear is the nub of a developmental stage in childhood characterized by symbol formation which magically uses transitional objects to manage the gap between Self and Other. It is the essential condition for passing from “first-and-only”, wherein hell is other people, to “being-amongst-others”, where we not only learn to tolerate otherness but are redeemed by it.

“You are therefor I am.” Satish Kumar.

This shift of perspective, is from what the Gnostics called “hylic consciousness”,  It comes from the Greek “hyle”, meaning husk, the unnourishing and winnowed part of an ear of wheat and is characterized by the person who simply lets themselves live without reflection or enquiry…

” He takes life as it comes and does not worry about the problem of meaning, its worth or its purpose. He devotes his time to the satisfaction of personal desires, enjoyment of the senses, riches, ambition.” R. Assagioli.

Transition from ego as landlord to the experience of no longer being master in ones own house is expressed in the Alchemical tradition as “the problem of three and four”.

..as taxing as divvying up a pizza between an odd number of people..

because three into four wont go. The conscious mind and the denizens of the deep Psyche are like oil and water. Making it across a threshold that demands acknowledgement and valuing of the Other without being swallowed up by them..

and with Pizza trainers instead of Hermes sandals for help…

is a way more tricky business than you might imagine..

“Not a few have perished in our work.” Alchemical saying.

A modern fairytale that expresses this sense of crisis and shows how it is resolved comes from an unexpected source, Robocop.

The hero Murphy has his humanity stripped from him and is largely reduced to robotic functioning, a fate suffered by many who adopt the first-and-only stance because it…

” contains the archetypal, omnipotent, defensive and mechanical, as well as the manipulative and destructive nature of Robot.” Lederman

The robot adaptation of the narcissistic character is, however, not entirely negative. Robocop can be redeemed by a combination of two factors. One is that his partner, Lewis, continuously reflects his humanity back to him. Her unflagging faith that he is in there somewhere gives him the courage to explore his obscure situation. Second, he finds his own dramatic solution to the problem of three and four.

Robocop has three protocols, 1) Uphold the law. 2) Serve the public trust. 3) Protect the innocent. As you might expect in any fairystory there is a hidden fourth directive which is entirely incommensurable with the first three..

Do not rise up against your masters.

Becoming conscious of this contradiction throws Murphy into turmoil. The law must be upheld… depending on who is involved. Serve the public trust, for as long as it serves the masters to do so. Protect the innocent, if its expedient…

Murphy realises hes been forced into a catch 22 situation that he cant win. Unless.. he plunges his hands into a massive electric generator that wipes out his programming but also nearly kills him.

Wright speaks of,

“the traumatic birth of self-consciousness, erupting into the still intact (and mechanical) symbiosis with mother.”

Realising that you harbour hidden and contradictory injunctions is shocking. Rewriting the inner script means first realising that you are being run from within by something so old, so habitual, so not-self that you can lose sight of its operation.

Folk simply clank through the day on automatic pilot fulfilling ancient expectations which may once have ensured survival but now serve the demoted purpose of simply keeping oneself on an even keel, maintaining the comfort zone, making sure reality does not intrude or question the preferred construct.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep the automatic pilot going because what they are up against is not a mere addition of information, another nut for the store house, but a shift of paradigm that threatens to bring the storehouse down.

Be careful what you wish for…

A good example of this is the story of Hiroo Onoda a Japanese soldier who continued to fight WW11 untill 1972 in the Phillipine jungles. He did this because he absolutely refused to believe that Japan could have surrendered. It was inconceivable. Surrender was more ignoble than suicide, something he had been expressly ordered against. Could his superiors be any the less accountable?

And so he fought on.

Many people have an inner Hiroo, an old soldier still fighting yesterdays battles,  disrupting the present with archaic material, fused to the Motherland, crushing the possibility of change or anything unscripted.

Over the years great efforts were made to persuade him that the war was over. Leaflets were dropped, photos and newspaper articles, all regarded by Hiroo as propaganda, fake news.

He was finally persuded only by hearing of Japans surrender from the lips of his own commanding officer, Major Taniguishi.

“Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years?” Hiroo Onoda.

Hiroo got a big shock, but he also went on to become a philanthropist and even donated some of his considerable back pay to local Phillipine projects as well as setting up a school Japan.

Many folk never get out of the Jungle. They remain omnipotently fused with the mother/land, content with the replacment of their autonomy by rows of endless choice, something to keep you occupied, hey, how about these new shoes you can get. They order pizza.