What is Shadow-work? The salutary tale of St George.

St George, patron saint of England and slayer of Dragons, has had the kind of rebranding over the centuries that would make even the most ardent spin-doctor blush. His name has become synonymous with the defeat of evil but he didn’t start out like that. Not at all.

George was a Roman soldier who spoke out against Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians and refused to renounce his faith. He was tortured and beheaded for his trouble near Lydda, also known in antiquity as Diospolis, near present-day Tel Aviv. Lydda then became an important pilgrimage site, and a church was built there over his reputed tomb. The location is especially significant because it later became a shared sacred site, venerated by Christians as Saint George and by Muslims as Al-Khadr, a mysterious, revered figure in Islamic tradition and Middle Eastern folklore, known as a bearer of divine wisdom and a symbol of life and regeneration. His name, meaning ‘the Green One,” reflects the belief that wherever he walks, life springs forth, linking him to vegetation, rain, and springtime renewal.

The earliest references to Al-Khadr are in the Qur’an (Surah al-Kahf, 18:60–82), Al-Khadr appears as a servant of God whom Moses meets while seeking deeper knowledge. The story is a living embodiment of shadow work.

Moses once set out on a long journey in search of self knowledge. He had been told that there was a servant of God who possessed a wisdom he did not. When Moses finally met Al-Khadr, the Green One, Al-Khadr agreed to let Moses accompany him on one condition: Moses must not question anything he saw until it was explained.

They first boarded a small boat owned by poor fishermen. As the boat carried them across the water, Al-Khadr suddenly damaged it, tearing out a plank. Moses, shocked, cried out, “Have you ruined it to drown its people?” Al-Khadr reminded him of the promise of silence.

Later, they met a young boy. Without warning, Al-Khadr took the boy’s life. Moses could not restrain himself: “How could you kill an innocent soul?” Again, Al-Khadr warned him that he would not be able to bear what he did not understand.

Finally, they entered a town whose people refused them hospitality. In that town they found a wall about to collapse, and Al-Khadr repaired it without asking for any payment. Moses, bewildered, said, “If you wished, you could have taken a wage for this.”

At that moment, Al-Khadr revealed the meaning of what had seemed unjust. The boat, he explained, belonged to poor men who earned their living at sea. A tyrant king was seizing every sound vessel by force; by damaging it, Al-Khadr had saved it from being taken. The boy would have grown to oppress his faithful parents and lead them into misery, so God would replace him with a child more righteous and loving. And the wall belonged to two orphans; beneath it lay a treasure left by their virtuous father. Repairing the wall protected it until they were old enough to claim it.

Thus Moses learned that what appears cruel or senseless can conceal mercy, and that divine wisdom often unfolds beyond the limits of human judgment.

Beyond the Qur’an, Al-Khadr becomes a powerful figure in Sufi mysticism, where he is seen as an immortal spiritual guide who initiates seekers into inner knowledge. His name, reflects the belief that wherever he walks, life springs forth, linking him to vegetation, rain, and miraculous intervention. As such he seems to represent the rewards of shadow work, provided Moses doesn’t assume too much and keeps his prejudices to himself.

In the West, George was treated very differently. His was a cause of heroism, combat and sacrifice, a model of chivalric virtue. In Western Christianity, the dragon legend displaced the emphasis on St George’s martyrdom and his association with Al-Khadr. It took a thousand years to re-package George, his incarnation as armour clad hero rescuing damsels in distress only fully emerges in the 13th century Legenda Aureate (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine, whose rendition of George as a latter day Theseus (whose dragon was the Minotaur) or Perseus (saving Andromeda from sea monster Cetus) was embraced by the church as a visible defender of order during the constant warfare and chaotic centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

St George became a saint who fights for faith, rather than dies for it. His martyrdom still mattered, but it became a credential of holiness, not the narrative centre. In the process he becomes a knight who triumphs over the shadow, bringing it to heel, rather than relating to it.

Jacobus de Voragine tells us..

“By this city was a pool or a pond like a sea, wherein was a dragon which envenomed all the country… when the dragon came near the city he poisoned the people with his breath… and so the people of the city gave him, every day, two sheep to feed him, so that he should do no harm to the people… Then was an ordinance made in the town that there should be taken the children and young people of the town by lot…”

This is the opening description of the dragon’s menace and how the city paid tribute — first with sheep, then with human youths from the Golden Legend narrative. When George arrives he first hears the woe of the towns people…

“Thus as they spake together the dragon appeared and came running to them, and Saint George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear…

So, whilst that all seems long ago and far away, much of our contemporary attitudes towards the shadow are hardly any different. ‘Integrating the shadow ‘ or ‘owning’ it runs the risk of simply constituting further subjugation, ”The shadow is not something one can simply assimilate. It remains autonomous and must be met again and again through conscious moral effort.” (Von Franz, Individuation and Fairytales.) She warns that treating the shadow as “mine now,” actually allows it to take over your behavior unconsciously. For her, shadow work is primarily a moral discipline and not a therapeutic technique.

Jung emphasises relating to the shadow rather than integrating it . This distinction matters because it acknowledges the shadow as an autonomous part of the psyche containing those traits, impulses, and potentials with which the ego does not identify. The idea you can integrate the shadow leads to inflation and potentially to what Abraham and Torok called ‘narcissistic incorporation’, the swallowing of something whole where it remains unmetabolised and serves to protect the ego’s self-image rather than modify it.

This is why Jung stresses recognition of the shadow which then makes dialogue, ethical relationship and conscious responsibility for its contents possible. Such an attitude involves acknowledging shadow traits without acting them out, holding moral responsibility for impulses without repression, allowing shadow material to inform creativity and vitality whilst maintaining a safe symbolic distance from it. This is very different from the idea of integration, from which two problems immediately arise. The first is ego inflation – the ego dangerously identifies with shadow qualities (“I own my darkness now”), and secondly a loss of dynamic tension within the psyche, a collapse into sameness. The shadow must remain partly other, so that it can be related to rather than possessed.

Medieval depictions of St George do in fact reference the problematic attitude of wanting to integrate the dragon. Uccello’s painting (above) has the curious and subtle detail of a golden chain linking the dragon to the maiden. They are connected, which means that violence to the one is violence to the other. If we approach the shadow with the lance of intellectual subjugation, ridding ourselves of it by making it ‘mine’, ‘working’ on the shadow in order to diminish it with its hated ‘negative’ emotions, then we do more than lose the richness of the inner other. The maiden, as Principle of Relatedness, will also be devalued, reduced to a concept, and the whereabouts of the inner treasure….lost.