Once there were two estranged brothers who lived on different sides of the mountain. Both were dirt poor and had loads of hungry kids. One day the eldest brother decided to go out into the forest and see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He decided to go down into the village and try to sell them anyway.
Meantime the younger brother had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below and so off he set.
Half way there the brothers bumped into each other. Both decided it best to seem pleased at the meeting and so they clapped one another on the back, boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain and finally came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which surely did not deserve them in any case. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.
When the older brother got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious at being cheated and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach his brother a lesson. When the younger brother got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met each cursed and remonstrated with the other, beating one another to a pulp before dissolving into hysterical laughter.
”I never could cheat you brother!’
‘No, and I never could cheat you….’
So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might ascertain where he kept his money. Sure enough when the time came the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two brothers sneaked into his garden to steal the rest.
The older brother lowered the younger one down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well that he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after the gold. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, elder brother set off at speed. Dreams of fabulous ventures rushed into his mind, dousing all conscience and he gave no more thought to younger brother till he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. Older brother was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man that he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon younger brother shouldered the gold and snaked away.
When older brother woke and found them missing he gave chase. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart, knowing that younger brother would wait for the prospect of a free ride and sure enough around the bend of the lane sat younger brother with his thumb out, so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So older brother now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his hungry kids to bury him in a shallow grave so that younger brother would think him dead.
When younger brother arrived all the children were crying that there papa had expired but younger brother was suspicious and asked to see the grave, making sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until older brother cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.
”I never could cheat you brother!’
‘No, and I never could cheat you….’
While older brother shook the earth from his clothes, younger brother ran off with the gold and to this day those two poor fools are stealing still.
The absence of the feminine in this story is overwhelming. There is no Principle of Relatedness whatsoever. For the want of it these two brothers exhibit almost every trait of mental derangement it is possible to imagine, a heady cocktail of the manic sociopathic, narcissistic, compulsive, psychopathic. They utilise primitive defences galore, denial, splitting, projection. Do these factors go together? Most certainly.
With the banishment of the Divine Feminine we find not only God becoming slowly unhinged but humanity as well. The earliest ever novel, the Epic of Gilgamesh details how the hero, having cut down the sacred grove of the Goddess loses his mind and kills his brother Enkidu, In their wake Cain slaughters Able, and Isaac goes to war with Ishmail in a bloodbath that rages still. The erosion of the Principle of Relatedness breaks bonds of fellowship between one other and loosens the coherence of our inner lives to the point of fragmentation. Meantime God becomes ever more grouchy, vengeful, weakened and sick until, by the early 19thC we find first Kant then Hegel anticipating his demise, perhaps from lonliness, until finally pronounced dead by Nietszche in 1882.
‘We think we can congratulate ourselves… imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters… We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases… C G Jung
In between God taking to his sick bed in 1830 and his death in 1882 you find a wild proliferation of madhouses being built across Europe and in the USA. Though the County Asylum Act was passed in 1808, which allowed counties to levy a rate in order to fund the building of County Asylums it was not until the passing of the County Asylum / Lunacy Act in 1845 that widespread construction began to take hold with the most famous efflorescence of this collective preparation, the Burgholzli, being completed in 1870 just in time for God’s final breath a decade later.
Of course Nietszche was speaking metaphorically. His claim that God was dead is to be understood in the sense that the three monotheisms had really ceased to be containers of the numinous, ceased to be collectively meaningful as vehicles for transcendent experience. Despite his own atheism Nietszche was none to happy about the death of god. He feared it would give rise to despair and Nihilism, the alternative to which was not much more inspiring, The Last Man, alone on his mountainside. A “most contemptible thing” who lives a quiet life without thought for individuality or personal growth: “‘We have discovered happiness,’ — say the Last Men, and they blink.”
If mental illnesses can be broadly divided into the Psychoses (including schizophrenia), the Personality Disorders (including narcissism) and the Manias (including Bipolar) then there is a sense in which we can consider all three to be an aspect of our collective response to the death of God, a poetic reaction to divine demise. With psychoses the ego is fragmented and broken up by the archetypal forces no longer contained in a living god, a tsunami of unconscious powers flooding the land mass of consciousness. In our story both brothers loose their human connection to each other and the villagers. With Personality Disorders, there is an identification with divine energies and subsequent inflation of the ego. In the story this is represented by the theft of ‘the rich man’s’ gold. The Manic-Depressive is alternately inspired by enthusiasm (from enthousiazein ‘be inspired or possessed by a god’) followed by the receding tide of depression felt in the absence of the transcendent, (exhaustion and the sudden loss of the gold).
Whilst it’s certainly true that a considerable degree of mental illness is down to maternal neglect we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of divine loss which exacerbates and perhaps even provokes a deficit of maternal care. We might imagine that such an archaic and apparently irrelevant detail from religious history as the Divine Feminine being branded the Whore of Babylon and drowned in the sea (repressed into the unconscious) with a millstone around her neck, has nothing to do with us and yet the spectre of such loss casts a long shadow. If the male counterpart of the banished goddess then expires with loneliness in the wake of his jealous impulse then we are doubly endangered, not only in our individual mental health but in the collective madness of our attack upon Mother Nature who is then bound to show us her teeth.
“Omicron” is an anagram for “Moronic”…which is Mother Nature’s way of mediating our ignorance and incompetence in the absence of a more conscious relationship. Stay safe.
