Author: andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

Buckle Up for the Dream Ride.

Would it be fair and reasonable, in any way shape or form, to do a psycho-analytic hatchett job on a 5,000 year wide swath of history on the basis of a few preeety snippety bits of arbitrarily and ,in fact, totally subjectively juxtaposed material?

Of course not…

Waal, lets go ahead and do it anyway…

You.. can’t, you’re er.. unqualified..

Unqualified and under resourced, baby.

Its grandiose, unproffessional and frankly narcissistic!

Yep, but as a wise ol’ dude once told me, the secret of transformation is to do deliberatly that which you used to do unthinkingly. So, buckle up.

I just know I’m going to regret this.

Seriously, we all know that repeating dreams are extremely important. Its a kind of code for everything you need to know about what’s going on. I had a repeating dream once, for decades, in fact, dark pools, truncated boys, half men.

So now we’re talking about you. I thought we were going to swarm through history interpreting humanity a millenia at a time. Is there a flourish that goes with that?

I’m getting there. Do you wanna hear the story or not?

Another interminable rant…

If you like…so…

… tell the fucking dreams.

Ok, so I found a number of references to the cutting down of sacred trees. Gilgamesh, having been told to by god in a dream, sets the scene with the destruction of the cedar forest of humbaba , and using them as a piece of sympathetic magic, as a part-object, to guard his now sacred walls.

He appropriates the divine feminine rather than having a relationship with Her. He builds Her into him (the gates), his very own great and divine pussy portal through which the solar hero journeys in and out at will, his womb of a city in which his mind might flourish but his heart will stiffle.

You were talking about trees, come on, focus.

Ok, yeah, Nebuchadnezzar…

You wot?

He was also a great king who had a dream about a tree….

Neb’ was a real firebrand, having been tied to the Assyrians skirts in vassalage for 300 years he bust loose and cut a great chunk out of the known world, arriving, for our purposes, at the temple of David bearing matches….and kerosene.

Had no kerosene in those days, mon.

Waal, the local equivalent. And it was like 9/11 except that you were surrounded, and Neb himself was driving down Broadway in a military RV.

Ooops. So what was his dream?

He dreamt that God told him to chop down the tree of life and he did.

Oh fuck, that is not a good thing, dude.

No, and having realised his kingly ambitions and smiting his way across the known world he went mad and lived in the desert for seven years eating grass.

Wylasha! So, what happened in the end?

The new regime that rebuilt the temple were mates of Neb whose very name means ‘descendant-of-Nabu-son-of-the-goddess-associated-with-her-untimely-ahem-demise.’ Thereafter the two guilded wings of the Arc of the Covenant were interpreted as male and female aspects of Yahweh and NOT the male and female personified by Hokmah and Yahweh before Neb’s invasion, an interpretation being pushed for by King Hezekiah the previous incumbent of Jerusalem who also had a thing for cutting sacred trees down, namely all groves within a days walk of the city gates so that you couldn’t go worship and still be home for tea.

So what was his fate?

Dunno, but i do know what happened to my mate K——, who dreamt he chopped down a great tree…..

wha’apen?

Well he kindly trashed my place, turning it into a kind of post modern installation, so I chucked him out but went round to his place very early the next morning ‘cos I was worried about him. I found him standing naked, knee deep in confetti having spent the whole night shredded every book in the house.

Not with iron rods!

No, not with iron rods, but with a can of kerosene in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

Booyakashar! Shouldna chopped de tree, mon.

Yeah, it was a padded cell for him for a while.

Santa Muerta.

A new divine figure has recently emerged in the poorest barios of Mexico City, Santa Muerta, our lady, the Saint of Death. Apparently She has the power to heal sins that even God cannot forgive, which is why she is so popular in the rougher ends of town.

Now, what is a sin that God can’t forgive?

One he commits himself.

What might that be, one wonders…? You know, given that He is without stain?

Yeah, except that one of his Exclusive Attributes is that he’s the only registered divinity with a washpot, a recepticle for, er.. bathroom leavings..

‘Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe’. Psalms 108;9

and for what does Yahweh require entire nations like ancient Moab, to serve such purposes?

Well, a sin that the washpot is for…

Yep, so Santa Muerta is actually soaking up stuff that God can’t live with in himself let alone forgive in others.

Exactamente. She responds to that which seems to bind all the other deadly sins together. Depersonalisation, strangely the brainchild of Yahweh himself whose primary modus vivendi is to smite at the slightest show of autonomy in his Bride, actively depersonalising her. People become chattle and washpots.

Its serious because putting a child’s use to you over and above its welfare is a form of wickedness.

And when its done to splurge pent up feelings or experiences unfinished from elsewhere its worse.

And when I can’t talk to Me, the child-as-object becomes the default position.

The value of the child is lodged in being-of-service, rather than just being.

And the service is to participate in a deluded system that says its more important to be special than it is to be loved.

And that is why it’s a sin in any language you like because it actively attacks the spiritual self of the other.

In the name of love……

The narcissistic encounter requires the active use of sado-masochistic witholding and invasive projective identification. This is inherently depersonalizing because it is specifically designed to attack the self of the other whose value is reduced to the extent they can be bent into a prefered shape.

What Yahweh did with Moab in a single symbolic gesture also gets played out to with Job whom Yahweh enviously attacks precisely because he is a good man.

Not much incentive to do as your told, hey?

Yeh, an’ ya had a go at Job for nuffink, cos he ain’t done nuffink to you an it was only cos Baelza betted you couldn’t make him say a bad fing, but you knew he was alright cos of the divine omniscience fingy and fucked with his head loads..

Yeh, burned his house down, killed everybody..

Wot, for nuffin, he hadn’t done anyfing bad…

Nop. Job and Mrs Job were totally good.

So he was just torturing them to see what they would do…

Well, he already knew that so he was just torturing them…

Cos Baelza bet him..

yeh

So he proved himself to Baelza.

yeh

and took his coin.

The Fate of Gilgamesh.

I’m struck by the fact that writing should be invented in precisely the best place to document the collapse of an age and from the point of veiw of the loser. Usually its the victors that write history.

What they did, in symbolic form, was to hold up a mirror to the tide that was about to engulf them. All over the known world the goddess was being over thrown or killed by semi divine sons. Attis and Cybele, Marduk and Tiamat, Yahweh and Hokmah.

DONT SPEAK HER NAME…

I have a rare gift and I’m about to be driven into the ground by hordes of really fast chariots driven by determined looking blokes with mean pointy beards. What shall I do? How shall I respond?

Let’s tell them a story…

So- proud Gilgamesh! He has defeated The Great Mother! He has destroyed Her sacred grove! He has hewn great gates from her limbs and floated them down the Euphrates in triumph. Gates made of the Mother Herself! No-one can get him now.

He has magically made a piece of mother, protection against Her, and with that a piece of himself set against the whole man.

Ishtar sees what’s going on and tries to intervene in a seductive way but is spurned, she then sends the bull of heaven to intervene. Enkidu and Gilgamesh chop it up and fling bits at the Gods.

Oh, dear, this is going to end badly.

Innit, you can’t do that. It ain’t right.

Fuck you, we don’t care. Gilga’s part god anyway and i’ve got serious horns…

But the Gods close ranks. They decide one of them has to die and its Enkidu. The inflated desecration of Ishtar’s bull widens the split between the idealised, narcissistic self and the shadowy horned self even further, so that having them be represented as brothers no longer works. One of the brothers must die and fall into the Unconscious.

The gods are a pranksterish lot. They like punishments to be amusing as well as instructive. If a punishment can’t be witty what’s the point?

So the say, ‘ok mr cool guy with your one-god bling, think you can live without the natural, the wild, then live without that part of yourself! Enkidu dies and you can be king of the world without stain…. alone.. with not even yourself to talk to.

And see how you fucking like it.

So you see, Assyrians, we had a king that was just like you, all pumped up on the life blood of others. Let us tell you of his fate so that you might be informed…..

Gilgamesh, him all upset now..

Yes, but only because his personal mighty bubble threatens to burst, and so he has to make a great heroic quest, not for the pearl of great price or some fair damsel, there’s no girl in the picture, he’s doing it to bolster himself up even more. he wants the elixir of immortality so that he can live for ever and be even MORE godlike. The towering walls are not enough. And even his tears at Enkidu’s death are for himself and the dawning realisation of his own mortality.

‘Im no care abou’ him frien’.

He’s learned nothing…

Him want him not his own fate…

and makes NPD like like a breeze in the park…

Boldly he sets off across the land of night, the sea of death, past scary monsters until eventually they come to the house of The Ancient One who might just be able to help him….maybe.

Last chance for Gilgamesh to wake himself up!

In fact, his task is to stay awake but he can’t or, is too cool to pay attention to the old guy.

Charcoal burners do it by using one legged stools to rest on. If they drop off, they drop off.

Gilgamesh! Even in the measly selfishness of your cheap wish, for an elixir of something, you screwed up. Because you’re so frickin arrogant that you think you don’t have to pay attention to anything around you which is why you can’t have a relationship and why your going to die like a bitch.

No! No! Give him one more chance! He’s had a hard life! I beg you.

And so the Ancient One’s Wife, Mrs Ancient One, pleads on Gilgamesh’s behalf and shows him where to find the magical plant he’s looking for.

There you go Sonny Jim, take care, mind….

There is no end to the ladies trying to help this boy, mon.

Despite his crap attitude….

….and the chopping and the flinging….

So he gets his plant.

Him score big time!

… but while he’s daydreaming about how cool he is and all the stuff you can amass over an eternity he takes his eye off the plant..

..snake com’ along and gobble it up.

The goddess takes it back.

And so ends the tragic story of Gilgamesh. Oh. no, not quite. He goes home and praises his walls. Himself.

What for Gilgamesh take him eye off the treasure? Mrs Ancient One tell him plain…

Because he’s lost the streetwise quality of Enkidu’s instinctiveness. He’s not whole and so the elixir is not for him. The she-snake takes it back into her safe keeping.

He’s left by himself, I no longer able to talk to me. He can make love too, but no longer with…

So, its got saucy bits after all!

Its a frickin epic you great arse, a cosmogonic encapsulation of the zietgiest, a collective dream spun forth from the psyche of ancient Sumer, poised on the cusp of a new age, peering forward into the..

Ziet wot?

Dilemma of The Sumerian Scribes.

The invention of writing in ancient Sumer would not have been a gradual process. A stroke of genius, an afternoon off, and the world was never the same again.

You don’t make a mark that has a sound and leave the rest to your descendents. Once the threshold is crossed and marks have meaning there is no going back. It would have been entirely mindblowing for the people involved, let alone the question, ‘ok, so what shall we say?’

‘If we die tomorrow, which , incidentally we might just with the Assyrians breathing down our neck, all macho and pumped up, what shall we say, at the end of our time…?

So they told the story of Gilgamesh…

And then the Assyrians came…

So,… what did they say?

What would you say if a massive warlike neighbour was about to descend upon you like a lion upon the flock?

Hey biblical metaphor, dude.Way to go!

Fuck off, I’m trying to create atmosphere here, you know…. dramatic narrative.

Well, knock yourself out my man…

Look, just be quiet and listen ok?

Whatever you say dude……..

So, your neighbours regard your flocks with lust….

bastards…

….and check out your patch in a pointy, military appraisally kind of way. You will go down and not just you but your whole culture, your entire heritage and way of life. What do you do?

No fair, dude!

Oh for fugsake, what do you write as the FIRST BOOK EVER…while you have the chance…?

er,, one shot, right?

One shot. You’d probably go through several stages with it….

…and changes of underwear…

…my first kneejerk reaction would be to gather stuff up, catalogue and file… then I’d get pissed off in a terrified, self wetting kind of way, and then plan some heavy duty counter magic, pulling shi’ out of my sleeves with all kinds of incantations from way in the back of the archives..

Not written yet dude, by definition…

….probably involving selling my soul to some dubious character, with even dodgier connections. Then, I might just settle down and write about something from which those that came after me might learn something. …

Booyacasharrr! Stick it to the man before you die like a bi…

….the wise and compassionate old Sumerians (no blood or virgin sacrifices) saw the Assyrians coming and thought, ‘the best thing we can do is give them a gift. for whoever comes after us is our children.’ So they gave them a story to learn about themselves……. for us to learn about….ourselves.

Moab is my Washpot.

Moab was a large tract of land, a country with its own king just outside Canaan., in which his Fantasticness would deposit his…leavings.

Yahweh dump him shi’ on Moab..

Yeees… a bombardment of shadow.

Moab, in ancient times, had

”become so utterly contemptible as to be likened to a washpot or basin in which men wash their feet. More than this, however, may have been intended—nay, we feel sure was intended by the expression.”

Thankyou, Phil of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit who, I’m afraid, has no time to answer any questions about the geneology of his family, so that queue will have to disperse.

Moab was the kid in the playground that got dumped on, that Yahweh deposited his imperfections and various bits of nail and hair and mank into.

These days we call it projective identification. It describes the process by which unconscious material can be effectively disowned by one party and claimed by another as if it were their own.

The dominant model that we have of the psyche, which we inherited from Freud, finds this phenomena a little embarrassing and hard to account for because the theories of that paradigm are intrapsychic, you fucked yourself up, rather than interpersonal, whereby one person might well pass on their ‘stuff ‘ to another.

Did you pack this suitcase, Sir? Has it been with anyone else since the time it was packed? Could some low down sonofabitch slip their shi’ in your stuff and make out like it was, you know, your shi’? make you carry it for them…so they can swan through, or by, or over, or around, and let you take da muddafuggin rap?

When Freud, as a young turk, tried to suggest, before the collective might of the Viennesse Psychiatric Society, in his ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, (1896) that the cause of mental disturbance lay in the way people were treated as children, he was entirely shut down…

Wot do you call a bunch of psychiatrists?

Is this a joke? not now for chrissake,

No, but its interesting.. would it be a ‘dourness’, or maybe a ‘bowtie’, or a

be fucking serious will you

Perfectly serious, serious business, I mean it must have been like the inquisition for poor Sigmund..

Except that he recanted and went back to his, ‘you only imagined it’, theory..

And were his friends, friends with him again?

Yes.

And did he get his stuff back?

Yes.

And the badges, and the twizzly bits?

Yes, even the twizzly bits.

Bonza

So, the notion that projective identification even exists is a social faux pas in certain cirles, marking you out as a believer in the myth that parents burden kids and hits straight on the nerve of how people go crazy.

Projective identification works like this; You depend on me for your life. Don’t forget that. But I don’t have what you need. Do forget that. We’ll have an arrangement, a covenant. Instead of what you need, which you now can’t remember, you will be special, instead.

Good here, innit?

And for this grand prize… of specialness, which is really top notch, you will fufil certain… conditions, expectations, a subclause of which, in tweeeeeeenzy print will be, ‘and carry my shit while I suck out your heart through a straw.’

It doesn’t matter. You just sign it. The ‘Dependence for life’ proviso at the top of the contract renders the rest of it all academic. You sign.

Anyhoo, yes, the grand prize, and our little arrangement…

One of the things that earmarks a narcissistic encounter is the use of projective identification. You get to feel as though someone just crapped inside you. Or made you feel that you deserve no more.

Their avid fortifying and walling off of some prefered, though highly defended self image, is hard work. Its easier to get some other poor bastard to take charge of all the incongruous stuff in life. The hidden painting in an attic solution tends not to work too well. Neither does walling it up. No, give it a host. Someone who’ll just walk away with your shi’ , now gnawing on their innards rather than your own.

Sounds like a plan.

One person passes another a piece of themselves, or a gritty solution of all their…dirt, under the table, without anyone noticing. And if you are unlucky it will be yours forever unless you can palm it off on someone else.

You’re it!

They get to be grateful, need you, miss you. You can be their special little guy. And their whore.

Moab was Yahweh’s bitch.

And so God washes off his pollution onto….people, just across the river, and we, like dutiful lambs, having learned by divine example, have each other. Oh frabjous day!

And so, oh great and mighty spoon of my heart, whilst you maintain all that fine PR with regular sousing of the people with your leavings your use of Moab as a washpot is so much less evolved than acceptance and dying and renewal. You get that lovely, fluffy bunny, freshly laundered smell that says, ‘mummy loves you’, rather than… ‘washpot’ which is so…frikkin…washpot.

ITS DONE OF YOUR DAMNBUSIBESSMJHGKVRYEDJDYKULYBLIUK

Well, actually, it is, oh great mountain of corpulence, because who is Moab other than me and mine?

THEN YOU WILL BE MY WASHPOL<YRFVHHGGYIFGUYGFUGY

We already are oh jewelled heap of my bowels, and its starting to piss me off.

The Cathars of Bordeaux

So, can we talk about the Cathars.

DONT SPEAK HER NAME.

No, no, sorry, not Her name, just the Cathars and, you know, what happened to them.

They were Her people!

They were both your people.

You cannot serve god and Mammon…

but it wasn’t Mammon, it was your wife..

DONT SPEAK HER NAME.

No, no, we’ll stick to the Cathars and not mention anything about the …unpleasantness. They were church going, yes,…. bit mystical, they believed in there being two gods.

THEYSTRAYEDFROMTHEPATHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Oh, great God, it was just that they could not understand your wild mood swings, I mean, err, your colourful and glorious outpourings, oh lord, and so posited a dark god besides your brilliant magnificence and, you know, She who must not be wossnamed.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Er, of course, umm, so, the Cathars.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Yes, and er, you did, oh mighty one. Every last one. 25,000 people.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Burned, actually. 14th Century

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

….great fire pits were dug and fed with massive trees… The people were made to walk the plank, the planks, great columns of people, bound, marching in rows, into the flames, ’till every last one were dead.

THEY WERE CRIMINALS!

Actually, they just couldn’t understand you oh, Serendipitous Light of Creation, They could not comprehend in their limited human limitationy thingy, how it was possible that a good and loving god such as yourself, my liege of hosts and all that, could possibly be the angry, crazy, rotwieler, rampaging god who…

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

….and so they felt that they had to assume that there were two gods, your eminenticle tremendousness. One good and kind and and wise and beautiful, oh sweet lord, a vision of fantabulous you know perfumed bowers and that, and another, wicked and cruel. Full of hate and….

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

And so in your infinite kindness and mercy oh lord you…killed them, oh God.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

even the babies…

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

On Smiting.

The earnest conversation about whether God exists or not seems to ride roughshod over the more cogent point that he is a certifiable psycho with serious bonding issues.

Do wot?

er, just wondering… about the smiting of your bride, the Chosen People. You don’t seem to be happy with your new choice…

Chosen People doesn’t do it for me. I tried. Really. I been patient. Cannot fault me there.

You’re disappointed and angry.

Ja man.

How long were you separated from …..

DON’T MENTION HER NAME.

from your…er..ex before you got together with your new bride, Chosen People?

Not long.

Three quarters of a page in Revelations actually.

I don’t know. I said, not long.

Do you think er,… perhaps you should have taken an epoch or two to you know, find yourself again, work through some issues, learn from the experience?

Learn? I know all..

Of course, oh Mighty One.. it’s just that maybe your disappointment is in the hastiness of your re-marriage after, the er… thing that never happened with you know who… ahem.

Speak plainly or be smote!

Yes, its exactly this smiting thing I’d like to ask about, oh Great One, who is so…. great. You’re clearly, well, upset. Perhaps regretting your decision. It stands to reason oh munificent and resplendent lord of hosts, that if you beat your wife then she’s not the one for you and that rather than your wife being unfaithful it is your own secretly harboured wish to be in the arms of another, the loss of whose embrace actually constitutes such a torture as to unleash…

KILL THEM ALL……..

Exactly, the smiting. Now you have been a bit over the top haven’t you?

KILL THEM ALL .

The thresher’s at Edom didn’t really deserve to have their house burned down for using iron threshing rods did they?

KILL THEM ALL.

The iron rods were somehow… offensive to you?

KILL THEM ALL.

And Lot’s wife, who doesn’t even get a name…

Well it was just the one. I let the others go. Am I not infinite in my mercy? Usually I take them all, sheep goats the lot.

You killed someone…?

Yeh, Lot’s wife.

But, how…why?

Well , she disobeyed me, mon..

By…

by looking at her burning home with all her stuff in flames, mon.

You burned her home..

Yeah, bitch. I burned it. Burned it right down, mudderfukka. Down to the ground, mon. They went down in that town. Know what I’m sayin’?

But why?

Mixing it up with other gods, mon.

Let me understand, you burned down her house as a way of appealing to her devotion and then killed her with an ironic twist for displaying the least of all human gestures conveying loss of something dear to her heart?

I turned her to salt, mon..Bamm!

er, okaaay,,, why the salt. I mean what’s that about?

Are you mixing it up with me, mon? Boooyakasha! Walk on before I’m beat you.

No,.. er, sorry,, I just wondered, just interested in your divine inventiveness and curious about what might motivate, I mean inform, no, er…. what you are trying to teach your faithless children, oh lord, by your great and mystical symbolism, you know, of the salt.

Its just salt, innit? you want me to explain when I already show?

But this is the problem, oh Great and Mighty One.

Wot?

Its not simply that your Chosen People feel unheard and, well frankly treated very badly, but we’re all a bit concerned that you don’t seem to be thinking through your own great wisdom either.. Oh Great One, which is maybe why things went so pear shaped with your first wife, Hokmah, back in the day….

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.

And then you did that most human rebound thing, got all cranky very quickly, you know… nudge nudge, new woman not quite what the old one used to do for you and boom, centuries of smiting.

They strayed from the path..

No, oh lord, we were never on the path, could never live up to …Her, no matter how she cheesed you off…and giving people the freedom to choose and then smiting them if they don’t choose you, is not really a choice is it?

Don’fugwidme mudderfukka.

But I’m worried and seriously anxious, oh Great One. You’ve lost Relatedness in more ways than one.

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.

Sorry, its just that the whole salt thing is still bothering me. I mean, was there a choice in the matter? Could it have been stone? Or even different types of stone. You carry quite a range, you know. Or maybe, you could have turned her into a tree, you know, a bit of creativity, poetic justice and all that. After all, in punishment for her loving your mother whose groves were sacred..

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME. I warn you, I will smite you.

And when you are done, oh Great One, who will you play with then?

On being more equal.

Narcissus is blind to the well maiden’s essential being, he depersonalises her with his rejection, declines relatedness, which is why she curses him with his own preoccupation, a dose of poetic justice the gods are so good at.

Gilgamesh does the same in his story when he is propositioned by the goddess Ishtar. He spurns her. He refuses the kind of awareness that might challenge his assumption that the psyche is what he knows of it, and thereby misses the opportunity to grow, to be fertilised/inspired by the Unconscious. The carnal invitation is one of initiation, a cross-pollination of energies that might give rise to something new..

I was once talking to a lovely guy who travelled the world giving talks about interesting stuff to packed venues. So, this woman comes up to us and asks if we’d like her to fascilitate our conversation. Like, we couldn’t possibly talk to one another under our own steam or were clearly failing to get friendship right. We needed her help. Like an angel of…. something, she descended to grant us the boon of knowing our own minds.

She was blind to our essential being, didn’t want the unpredictable, lively dance of our conversation. It took something away from her. So she’d step in and ‘fascilitate’ .

The divine spark couldn’t be shared, and so everything must be unintelligible. You must be talking crap, even if you aren’t.

Who gets to have the spark is a big deal. And many a relationship is fucked up simply because we don’t know how to be on the same level playingfield.

There’s no divine template for sharing space.

And so we can’t see what is in front of us. No matter what you are staying or sharing it has no ultimate validity without my stamp of approval.

What is it with Yahweh stamping people? Everyone seems to get stamped in the Old Testament. Stamped with his mark or stamped with his foot. He even stamps his own wife, before tossing her into the briny foam.

You stamp property.

And that’s what we do with one another if only one person can have the stage at a time. We reduce the other’s stature to that of stock, and then of course cannot possibly condescend to converse let alone congress, concealing meantime that ragged hole passing for a centre.

Like dutiful children who follow by example rather than fine verses we start our own bit of stamping, labelling, owning, exploiting, any thing to avoid being in a situation where who has the spark becomes a matter of debate.

To follow example is in our DNA. It comes under the ‘how to survive’ icon on our hard drive.

So its not really right to talk about narcissists. Our culture is narcissistic. The dominant religion is narcissistic. It would be better to talk about the narcissistic encounter, something that happens between.

I saw a lovely narcissus-free encounter on the bus. Mother with shopping and two small kids, the larger thumping the smaller protesting child. Mum says, ‘Billy, is Carl as big and strong as you?

No ways!

Remember that next time you thump him…

An honest measured thump… rather than what I did in the absence of such containing forbearance, convincing my younger brother that mother was dead and that he’d been sent away to Mars which just happened by chance to look like where we lived, forcing him to carry the dark wound of my own black mamma’s loss and being sent away so that it could be his experience and not mine.

I could magically have a different and better experience….

…..and join in the joke that Andy only speaks Swahili.

Hilarious.

The Whore of Babylon and the Erudite Scholars.

In the process of watching a video on ancient civilisations, I noticed in the ‘related topics’ tool bar, a video announcing itself with the title, ‘Is religion unfair to Women?’, and a still frame of several erudite people sitting about in earnest discussion.

Its amazing. In all seriousness and with the implication that it could go either way (and that the violent, draconian rejection of the divine feminine over the last 3 millenia might just be swept under the carpet for the duration) we’ll sit about and earnestly discuss.

So I clicked on the learned scholars and …yep, there they are, discussing in an even tempered kind of way.

The endless polite masturbation is excruciating…

Hello! Is there anybody in there?

Can I just recap a moment, and please, correct me if I’m mistaken, but the first thing our recently and acrimoniously divorced God does once he has spent a week refurbishing a new bachelor pad is to take All his divine matrimonial angst out on Eve who he curses Forever, rejects eternally and is to blame for EVERYTHING.

Now, is religion unfair to women! Humm, let’s see….is the camera running? Humm, so your filming me now? Hum, is this my best side?

Our God, so needing to have the stage to himself that he’d rather hook up with humanity, and through no illbehaviour on Her part, divorces his wife Hokmah/Sophia/Wisdom circa 3,500 BC., banishes her to Babylon, slags her off as a whore, burns every city where she is openly worshipped, decrees through his kings that her groves be cut down and scorched bone fragment ground into the hilltops where she is worshipped to defile and pollute them. Her priests are killed, holy books destroyed, followers cast out.

In summary, Women’s evil is responsible for all human suffering and shall have no divine representation WHATSOEVER.

Now, where were we, ah yes, Dr Upyerbum, so, do you think the judeo/christian religion is unfair to women?

We get the same erudite pondering in the next ‘related topic’ about the book of revelation… related mostly by the same ponderous tones, pompous observations, and the deeply held conviction that it must be about them… and their enemies…

Why would people ponder so much of that which is supposed to be so revealing?

Any hoo… marvellous innit, a holy book that’s guarenteed to be about you aaaaand your great victory over your enemy! And every century, those that lived in went, ‘ hey, they’re talking about us!’

And the Beast must be whoever I hate and they’re going down, dude.

The fact that this vision circa 170AD coincides perfectly with the last gasp of the historical epoch in which the aforementioned Whore of Babylon, with her name clearly stamped like frickin’ ID on her forehead, was indeed cast down, broken up and thrown into the sea followed by a large millstone just by way of punctuating Her demise.

We are so absorbed in our own little worlds hey? Little worlds that have, with profound irony, become so by the restricted vision that 3,000 years of ‘be good or I’ll smite you!’ does to kids. You can have your name stamped on your forehead and we still don’t know who you are because you are not real and do not exist and therefor cannot be called by name despite the stamp. Sorry. Next.

The Archetypal Narcissist.

There’s a detail in an ancient story I find intriguing. The story, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, is fascinating in and of itself. It is, after all, the first and oldest story ever written down, penned (or is that ‘stylused’? ) in ancient Sumerian nearly 5 thousand years ago.

The Epic predates much of the Old Testament by several millenia. It is also the only written record from a time where goddess worship would not get you hung drawn and quatered. But most of all, this first story is one about the first man, the first king, who got it into his head to build a massive wall around where he lived and give it a name, Uruk.

The story of Gilgamesh is a salutory tale about what happens when you wall yourself off from Nature.

The king builds his wall, feels chuffed with himself, feels safe from the things-out-there that never seemed to bother him before…. now his wall is built the sounds of the creatures are all…alien, and worse, there is a wild man out there terrorising the land.

Of course, the wild man is his own split off natural self, Enkidu, whom he defeats and charges with the task of joining him on the quest to defeat the ‘Humbaba’, a monster, and destroy the sacred grove of Cedars she lives in. Trawl the archives and you find that Humbaba, is also Kumbaba, AKA Cybele, Mother Goddess of the Ancient world.

Oops.

She is defeated. Her sacred grove, the symbolic tree of life is cut down. Gilgamesh commands Enkidu to help him carve the wood into a set of great gates which they then float down the Euphrates back to Uruk.

What an odd tale! If you watch the u tube videos about Gilgamesh there is much chuckling up the sleeve at those citizens of Uruk at this stage of the story who were clearly just cobbling stuff together as a way of making sense of the world.

Innit?

The fact that senior scribes and priests dedicated their all to a cryptic tale containing, like the shard of the hologram, their entire cultural experience, seems lost on the commentators satisfied in their superiority……and narcissistic presumption.

5,000 years ago, on the fertile plains of Mesopotamia, ego consciousness was manifested by the creation of a walled city. The difference between me and not me emphasised by the novelty of the sudden schism between the world in here and the world out there.

Gilgamesh, previously an entity complete but without self awareness, becomes self conscious but only at the price of an inner split between an idealised self and a dark, shadowy, horned self represented by Enkidu. These ‘brothers’, can only hold together so long as the idealised self defeats the shadow self, setting it the task of raiding the sacred grove and killing off the principle of Relatedness. In so far as the trees represent the earthly manifestation of the Goddess, the gates are made from the defeated and dismembered body of the Great Mother.

Gilgamesh is compelled to split himself in two and shore up the defences of his fragile ego with the bones of the Great Mother. Divided from her he can no longer ‘cathect’ what he needs. So he can’t really grow up. He can only reinforce his defences against the aliveness of the feminine principle with her own dead body which will soon lead to the death/loss of Enkidu, only to be ameliorated by growing awareness of his own mortality.

Sound familiar?

When we split ourselves off from our own dark nature in the absence of a containing mother whose divine counterpart is degraded and cut down leading to hubris and loss of relatedness, then narcissism ensues.

Does this mean that narcissism is endemic in our culture from the beginning? Does it mean that the primary causes have to do with splitting off the shadow and devaluing the feminine? Is the way through by virtue of grief and sorrow?

What will the first story tell us about what can be done? Will Gilgamesh find a way out of his situation?

What needs to be done in our own time with the groves being destroyed at record speed and the dark brother being slaughtered beyond every city wall?