One day Pot had become very bored. It seemed to be no life at all to be merely making porridge and so it confided in Walking Stick that it was off to seek its fortune. Walking Stick decided to tag along since it felt that to be a Walking Stick was likewise no life at all and so the two went out into the world.
On their travels they came across the Old Man of the Mines who took fright at such an uncommon sight and ran off to take shelter. As he ran the gold he carried on his back spilt out onto the path where Pot and Walking Stick discovered it, to their great delight. Pot filled himself up with the illicit gold declaring that he would weave a thread of wire round himself with these new found riches so that he would never break and be immortal. Walking stick had a better idea and smashed Pot to smithereens, taking all the gold for himself. He paid the local blacksmith to fashion himself a great golden crown which seemed very grand until he got to the river and tried to cross over but was dragged to the bottom by his fancy hat and drowned.
The use of the Old Man’s gold for their own purposes is a form of wielding magic that gets both our heroes into trouble very quickly. Normally we think of magic as something involving eye of newt and toe of frog, witching hours and windswept heath. It suits us to construe it like this so we can distance ourselves from the taint of such practices which are often closer to home and way more common than you might like to imagine, requiring neither lonely moor nor a motley assortment of unlikely ingredients.
If you give the traditional definition of magic, ‘the use of supernatural forces for evil purpose’, a modern interpretation, ‘the use of unconscious contents for egoic motives’, then it becomes easier to see the proliferation of magic in modern times.
In the practice of psychotherapy its rather usual to witness the way in which children are used/coersed into shouldering parental troubles..
‘The greatest danger to the child is the unlived life of the parent.’ C G Jung
Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it is also contagious, making life not worth living for there next generation as well. Black sheep are invariably the victims of a form of black magic, laden down with the bad conscience, the shortcomings, misgivings and anomalies of parental projections which children embody only too readily.
Yet just as bad is the idealisation of children. This leads to inner splitting between the ego ideal and the shadow which is then free to act out its own mayhem in the world.
‘In the outer world the child may choose in accordance with expectation, in the inner world he lives a life evermore at variance with it…’ Frances Wickes
In our story what gets our heroes into so much trouble is the inflation of arrogating the Old Man’s gold to themselves. The Old Man is an archetypal figure, a denizen of the Unconscious which Pot thinks he can contain and Walking Stick believes he can wear as an ornament. The result is disaster. Walking Stick loses all sense of morality and is suddenly and violently possessed by the shadow. His subsequent inflation leads him to be directly swallowed up by the Unconscious.
One of the most common proliferations of this tendency to split oneself and drive the shadow even further into the Unconscious where it is bound to grow horns and a tail is the new age philosophy of ‘positive thinking’, which aligns the personality with an ego ideal at the expense of wholeness.
‘When the ego assumes that it is sovereign of the psyche, the gulf between conscious and the unconscious widens producing an increase of emotional chaos that shuts out understanding compassion and tolerance.’ ibid
The spiritual materialism of garnering the Old Man’s gold to the personality of Pot and Walking Stick is a form of pernicious magic because it attributes the power of the unconscious to the ego ideal making it insensitive, immoral, greedy and power hungry in the process. A good example is the misuse of the ideas contained within ‘The Secret’, a best selling book whose fundamental message, that gratitude generates abundance, was almost entirely distorted by its readership into the notion that you can manifest whatever you want if you give it enough attention. Such use of perennial wisdom for personal gain is tantamount to a regression into the infantile omnipotence of ‘wishing makes it so’, which not only concretises the persona making further growth impossible but generates a kind of god-almightiness capable of perpetrating all kinds of wickedness in the world.‘
‘The gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting-room or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics upon the world.’ Carl Gustav Jung.
On this Remembrance Sunday, and as a Veteran myself, I cannot help but reflect, not only on the sacrifice of the dead, but upon the way in which the inglorious servants of Empire filled the minds of fresh faced youth with archetypal notions of valour and glory, each one made Wotan’s Siegfried for the sake of making the rich more powerful and the poor more destitute. It’s said that if all the dead lads from the Great War were to file past four abreast it would take a full five days for the column to pass by. And why? So that fat men in expensive suits could carve up the third world like a plump turkey. Was that not wicked? Was that not a psychic epidemic let loose on the world? The watchword of Remembrance is ‘never forget’, and yet we have just slept through COP26, dozing with gustation’s after dinner nap while the Forests burn, while Skies choke, while Children die of malnutrition in Yemen and Madagascar for the sake of the Dow index and Corporate tax bonuses. Is that not dark magic? Is that not disastrous appropriation of the Old Man’s gold?
