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.

On Being Special.

My country was named after a great hero. I was raised in Rhodesia, last outpost of our marvellous empire, only country in the world to ever be named after a man, my hero Cecil Rhodes.

He would have called it Cecilland, but the double l would have made it sound Welsh, which was foreign, and gay which in those days was punishable by being thrown into a prickly ditch at the very least. Actually, they’d just kill you. Hunting accident.

Yes, Cecil was my hero. Such a proud legacy he left.

”You can relax in the sure knowledge that having been born British you have already won first first prize in the race of life.”

what a relief…

Yeah, how cool is that…?

One day I found myself pointing guns at people out of my legacy of specialness. In protection of our divinely sanctioned ripping off of other people’s stuff and I caught myself, teetering on the brink like a drunk on a clifftop.

I later found out that Rhodes ran a secret white supremacist club called ‘Eugenics’, headed up by himself and lord Alfred Milner, an horrendous, murdering bastard..

but special..

that my proud boarding house was named after at school. They were to the Afrikaaners what the Afrikaaners were to the African and killed thousands of them, women and children, in concentration camps during the Boer war about 1905.

Like Hitler..

I said 1905. Hitler got the idea, and permission, from them, I mean us.

When Milner arrived in Southern Matabeleland, where I grew up,  his diplomacy was exemplified in a single gesture, he rounded up the entire royal family and hung them.

Because they were evil?

No, because they were in his way.

My upbringing was seeped in having greater rights than others. The African, as a representative of anyone who was not me, was inferior.

hardly out of the trees..

it never occured to me that almost every African I ever met spoke four languages…

The majority of us superior people were raised by Africans who were mostly unspoilt by our tyranny so we kids got what we needed from them. They gave us the good stuff regardless..

my nanny was called Suzannah and I loved her….

…whilst I was taught to hate her family…

of which I was a part.

Of course, it was common knowledge that kaffirs were stupid. All except the one who looked after you, who was your mother and of course she was ok. Your own nanny was different from all the stupid ones.

and/or, my mother is inferior and so am I.

Imagine being raised in two worlds that regard each other with complete incomprehension.

What do you see in the mirror?

Now imagine going through that period of time, 3,500 BC when the whole known world was like that and suddenly half the community, those that worshipped The Great Mother,, were cut off and outlawed/exiled.

I remember my Mother, sort of..

No-one speaks Her name…

and if your name is not spoken,…

you cease to exist.

No-one speaks her name.

And no-one talks about Grampa Lawes being jewish and found lying dead on a mountain of beans.

I’m 40 years old when it occurs to me one day that I’m jewish.

WTF?

Piece it together, grampa lawes is found dead in his posh house in the Hove all sprawled on his beans. paternal mother’s maiden name was..what?

went to the library..

jewish.

I called my dad

yeah, maybe, on your mother’s side..

Maybe? Are you fucking kidding me?!

What the hell do you mean, maybe.

How can anyone forget who they are? How can EVERYONE forget?

In three generations we forgot who we were. And if we can do that on the ground what does it take for She Who Mustn’t Be Named….

IUJG<JHNG<JH<MHJNMHJ

to slip from consciousness.

Not long.

For some years the church fathers rather naively put many of her books in the Apocrypha, tacked on at the back of the bible as if it were okay so long as nobody spoke Her..

KFKHGFKGHF

The estranged spouses lived at different ends of the house until the Apocrypha was ousted to her own separate appartment in down town Antiquities. The last hard back copy I saw had, ‘Last copy in the County’, stamped in the flyleaf.

Many other of her books, like those dead Sea scrolls found at Nag Hammadi are now under lock and key in the bowels of the Vatican.

In the dungeon, mon!

Yeah, but thankyou hey, really, for who would you incarcerate but the opposition, tacitly conveying the significance of the prisoner…?

and thankyou to Cecil for giving me something to kick against that I might one day find myself. But not before swallowing his narcissistic bullshit hook, line and sinker.

 

 

I

On living up to Expectations.

If a child is expected to fail it will. Kids always live up to their parents expectations, particularly the less than salubrious.

My brother was expected to fail. Of course nobody said as much, they didn’t need to, he was given euphemistic titles such as ‘the practical one’ in the family, which was code for thick as pig shit and he dutifully rose to the occasion. It took being pegged to the antarctic ice through his clothes, sleeping bag and tent for three days of 200mph winds to knock it out of him.

Expectations are powerful because our survival instincts are tuned to co-operation with our group and serve collective values. We are born assuming others know best and give them due credit for that. If it were otherwise we’d not get far past inventing the wheel.

We’re born respectful.

So when God says to Eve don’t eat of that tree what does she understand of God’s expectations? Had there been an explanation it might have been different, something she could make sense of and.. respect. But He gives her no explanation, no meaning in the injunction, without which she hears only a hidden expectation of betrayal.

His command, without reference to her need for meaning, carries an implicit sense that this communication is only about discipline, authority and power. It is not about love.

You musn’t eat the fruit.

Why?

Because I say so.

Who is it for?

Nobody.

Sorry, what is it for?

To see if you would obey.

Not because i might die?

No.

Or because it would give me a tummy ache.

No.

So, just to see if i could be trusted?

yes.

So you don’t trust me then?

Not entirely.

But you made me in your image?

Yeees.

So, either you can’t be trusted, or you’re just fucking with my head.

HTDKYDKH<GDCH<KGCF<JHV<NBVCHGDCTH>UYBFKYTRFKBJFYG

Moab was not Yahweh’s first washpot. The die of sadistic witholding is cast from the Beginning. The interaction with Adam and Eve in a modern setting would have someone calling for a social worker.

The father uses sadomasochistic and manipulative techniques to seduce Eve into behaving as he knows she will with the limited awareness she has prior to gaining  the knowledge derived from the apple. To obey you have to know right from wrong, you have already to have eaten the fruit. He tempts her..

thought the devil did that…?

Well, he finishes the job but its God that puts the idea in her head and makes her curious. His style of communication is actually psychologically damaging. Don’t use the faculty I gave you but do use one I have not.

Eve is trapped, she’s been slipped something under the table and its really ugly, a hefty archetypal gollop of contradiction and bad faith with which she must trip and fall, the sudden condensing focus for God’s ready curses, a toxic parent who gives a child a chore that it cannot perform in order to shame and vent His spleen.

Why is it a trap?

Because she must fail.

The consciousness that God is asking her to exercise is in the apple.

Not in her.

She cannot understand what he means and he knows it.

I watched a man point to a shop sign down in the village and patiently spell the words out letter for letter to his son, teaching him. Problem, the kid was two.

What the hell is he doing? Where is he coming from? What is his purpose?

He feels so good and riteous. He’s fathering….. whilst actively avoiding intimacy and contact. He might have joined the child in his world rather than shoe horning the boy into a narcissistic fantasy of how great a father he is.

The child cannot, with the best will in the world, fulfil what’s being demanded with out abandoning his own reality principle. He looks vacant, trying to make meaning. Daddy expects….something. I don’t know what but he is always right. I cannot understand. I must be stupid….

….which is the unconscious purpose of the exercise.

You will never, never, be as smart as me.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

Narcissistic Collusion

What makes us collude with Narcissism? It’s like allowing yourself to be bullied by a two year old! Why would you do that? For love? Well you might say so, I certainly have, but I no longer buy it.

Love wants us to grow and narcissistic collusion keeps us all small.

I once new a woman who tolerated an extremely narcissistic husband for 30 years because he once made her a cup of tea…. and on the strength of that alone commited herself to his tyranny. Was she a woman who loved too much? Too much something, but it wasn’t love.

The actual service with which he provided her, as a recepticle for all her inferiority  whom she could then safely sneer at from across the room, was enough glue to hold the marriage together… forever.

In order to keep her eye off the ball she needed a whole gamut of back-up reasons for being with him, pseudo explanations for his behaviour and saintly giving him ‘the benefit of the doubt’, only made serviceable by living in eternal doubt herself and  underming the entire structure of her own natural intelligence.

She believed in him all that time, not because he gave her any hope but because her unacknowledged need compelled her to find… anything, a lousy single gesture, to justify what she had done and cover up her deeper motives. She searched his every word and bent his every deed into some fresh shape that might then justify her own stagnant, loveless existence.

To do this she could turn black into white and rain into sun.

We humans are good at that.

Look at how we respond to God’s bad behaviour. We constantly let him off the hook out of our own urgent need to…what?

We  hear over and again about how we were given free will but actually it doesnt say that anywhere, not at all… We need to believe it that’s all. In order to fulfil our own urgent need to.. what?

Jah man! Everyone know God give us free will…

Bollocks, its a delusion or at least the reducto ad absurdam of ‘we have free will therefore God must have given it to us’. The story of the apple suggests we’re capable of all kinds of stuff He didn’t intend. We collude with the idea that we were given free will so as to explain  any subsequent smiting having failed to exercise it appropriatly.

Dat’s sin, mon.

No, we’re explaining away petulant behaviour we wouldn’t accept in a toddler because something in us needs to.

We alla’ us got free will, mon.

Yeh, but only as a result of dissobeying god. How can God ask us to exercise that which Eve stole when his punishment of her wanting to be conscious is to be cursed for eternity? His entire beef with people is Eve’s sin and yet now we are being asked to exercise it in order not to… sin.

Yeah, an’ it gets missed a lot that God frew them out the garden because they disobeyed…

..when actually what he says is, ‘lest they become one of Us’.(Gen 3:22)

He had someone with him?

Unless he was talking to Himself…

Hum, at the very least, he doesn’t want us to be conscious.

That’s not very nice, but… he did give us free will.

No, he never. Look, I’m a bright chap and the internet can give you every quote that’s even vaguely related and I’m telling you I trawled the lot. We just want to believe in this great gift which we have to honour on pain of eternal damnaation because we want to.

What you actually find is that free will is stolen, stolen and punished. Why would we dare exercise that which, just by the having of it, gets you cursed forever?

Why? Because we don’t have to be responsible. Yahweh is easy, you don’t have to search your heart. You don’t have to try too hard. Paul sells  his whole spiel to the Thessalonians on the basis that the lords yoke is light and that ALL you have to do is abstain…

an’ praise..  got an easy ride mon, don’ complain…

I don’t want a fucking easy ride. I want to grow and growing is hard. I want something other than your feather bed. Did you ever wonder why our culture is so hungry alla time, desperate for that instant gratification fix..?

er..

…because, there’s no frikkin challenge within the fold that’s really worth  the candle, so we may as well stay at home and stuff our faces. We believe in the lie that free will is something we’ve been given so we don’t have to face the fact that God wants us small and compliant..

And why…

..because we want to be …small and compliant.

 

The Green-eyed God

If you’ve ever tried confronting narcissism you know your gonna lose.  Those walls are high and the Great Mother’s bones are built into them. Confrontation immediatly becomes a verbal wrestling match with the Marquis of Queensbury firmly gagged and bound  in a corner. Or, the ground under your feet suddenly disappears and you’re now discussing some completely unrelated issue without knowing how you got there except that you will lose this one as well.

And if what you’re wanting to air is the issue of jealousy, the Marquis will be bundled out in a rolled up carpet while the barometric decompression in your lungs anticipates a variation of the mesmeric deluge, ‘yeah, but no, but’.

It will then either be flatly denied with a hint of, ‘ what’s your problem?’ Or turned back on you, ‘this is obviously  your stuff.’ Or, condescended and humiliated, ‘did you get that out of a lucky packet?’ Or the ante is simply upped with ,’you don’t love me.’ Your role is now reduced to useless reassurance of the one who, moments ago, was trying to scratch your eyes out.

So, what kind of progress do you think might be made trying to confront God over his jealousy?

Zero

So, we won’t even try, hey?

no point, mon.

Despite the explicit mention of ‘other Gods’.

Can’t go there, mon.

Despite the injunction, sorry, command not to covet..

..yeh, but no but…

…and whooping his bride down the centuries for all kinds of imagined shenanigins..

mus’ be you done sumfink.

Methinks Yahweh protesteth tooo much..

Him got someone on the side…..himself…?

Or wishes he did. His current bride is clearly not up to the mark which begs the question of who set the bar.

She-who-cannot-be-nam..

DONT SPEAK HELUFYTDCGVNBMN..

yep, God’s constant paranoia about our unfaithfulness is more than the tacit acknowledgement of an unnameable…….

HGJH<FVH<JNVBMNVB

…….co-respondent, it is a projection of his own desire for she-who-no-one talks-abo…

HGFHG.

Him lust for him old flame.

Yep, Yahweh’s ‘leavings’ in the washpot of Moab, are primarily hormonal.

Moab?

Your neighbourhood.

Is that why the West is preoccupied with sex an’ bling?

Worse, matey, where else could the fulcrum of god’s shadow be brought to bear but on our own souls? Judgement day is small potatoes next to the fact that we are already up to our ears in God mank.

So, we sloshing about in God’s shadow…

No, God’s shadow is sloshing about in us.

Like we was His host.

Tapeworm styley. Him angry.. but need us..to be angry at.. No end to that one, mon.

Yeh its loopy.

Loopy lou.

Interesting word, loopy.. We all know it means,’crazy’, but the crazy is not about what you are doing, but that you are doing it blindly and going round in circles. The problem is the looping and not really a function of the territory through which you might be passing at the time.

Yeahhh…and…

So , what’s loopy here begins with having to fail in our endevour, in bending to divine sadism, hoping it will all go unnoticed. God uses us for His washpot so that he comes up all sparkly and restored…

But now we full of …. ‘leavings’ and bits of beard…

Yes, we have attributed to us, and identify with, a piece of divine shadow…

we gon feel bad..

Well, icky, yes, but more to the point, we just can’t do it. It’s all too much. We start going mad in the catch 22 of eternal failure either to contain God’s projection or, trying bravely, but looking like pervy curbcrawlers in the process.

So where is the loop?

I’m coming to that. Carrying god’s shadow is a bit of a buzz. Its like being juiced up on some fantastic high octane fuel, the cheif symptom of which is that we fall into the delusion that we don’t need one another anymore and are separate from Nature.

Loop, make the loop…

So that’s a sin, against ourselves and one another..

loop, loop…

for which we should indeed, feel bad…

guilt can be good..okay..

And gives God a hook to hang his washpot on. We masochistically buy into his game, bewailing the smiting, lack of favour and accusations of infidelity in order to cover up for the fact that we are getting off on the heady cocktail of god’s mank water.

And being special.

And there’s the loop, you are special but failed. You can be sorry all you want. You’re still wrong and bad. For as long as we carry god’s imperfections his jealousy will be justified. But his love for us depends upon us being His Moab. No win.

That ain’t right, mon.

And what happens when a child is put in a no win situation?

Him start trashin’ de place.

Loopy Lou.

The King who Grew.

Once upon a time there was a great king whose dark brother, another great king, lived just across the river.

Now, our great king, who was very, very powerful…. but good, or at least , that’s what they say… our great king, being unable to do no wrong….,

That’s a double negative, it should be unable to do, or abl..

…be quiet and listen, our great king, being unable to do no wrong, because of his mighty greatness and without anyone cottoning on, began to fall sick.

OOh dear..

And if he really did have a crystal ball and dared to glance in it he would have been mates with his dark brother and laughed off being king altogether because his greatness and his sickness were going to cost the kingdom quite badly.

Bomba…!

Our king had a mysterious illness, the chief symptom of which was that he could no longer see his reflection, aaaan’ he’s kinda getting bad tempered and… homicidally moody.

Every day he would order his captive maid to bring him the handmirror. And every day, as she passed it to him with head bowed and fingers quaking, he’d demand,

”why do you quake so, do you fear me so much?”

And every day she would reply,

”It is not fear of you, but for you , my lord.”

His face had turned hard, his cruelty became legend and he did gaze lustfully at all the cool stuff his brother had.

Is he still good?

Yeees, but, a bit, you know, unwell…

That’s a relief… hope he gets better…

So, he tore down the sacred images of the people,

..because they were badly behaved?

Presumably, and he trampled ash and bone into the very ground of their most holies and sent armies everywhere.

against the bad ones?

It doesn’t say..

They must have been bad…

The armies were totally victorious..

Yay..

The people were so scared of him they just handed over the keys to their cities to his captains and the armies went in and did as they pleased without reference to common law.

are we still good..?

I don’t think so..

Oh this is a crap story!

Wait, lets see what happens..

I don’t want to be bad…

Well, let’s see if the king can get out of his situation..

..and become good again?

who knows..  So, the people were crushed and enslaved and did our king’s bidding in their great numbers. Plagues and barrenness swept the land.

…definately bad at this stage…

I reckon, and the king took no wife but had unnumbered concubines kept in readiness for his lusts. And he declared new religions he was the boss of and the name of the Old Ones could ne’er be spoken again on pain of death.

An’ Him tax de people..

And still he was not satisfied……The kingdom of his dark brother lay fat and sleek on his doorstep, offensively delicious, insultingly verdant, mockingly sweet…. until a time came when he thought of nothing but the land beyond his grasp and ALL that he did not have.

And it kept his hunger gnawing away and he began to resent his brother for what he was doing to him. And then his brother stole his sleep and his appettite for other things and his lust for his concubines so he went round there and drove a spike into his head.

And so now, uhuh uhuh, he was king of the known world. Uhuh,Uhuh, he could get laid when he liked..

could already do that, mon.

an’, an’, slay whom he pleased..

ditto.

everyone was scared of him,

..already said that, mon.

He could sleep in on a weekday….

him didna really need him brudda’s kingdom.

But he didn’t know that until it was in his grasp and, indeed, something new began to bother our king. The fact that his reflection had disappeared was, well, annoying, but he could live with that, no, this was something new that crept and slunk into his dreams one night and in the morning he new what it was. He was still hungry.

Nuffin’ new…

Oh yes there was, because this time around he knew without doubt that he had all that he wanted. Nothing more existed beyond his majesty…

What he wanted was not what he needed…

and so his stomach rumbled…..

and the king listened to the words of the rumbling , ‘if what you really want is not whatever you want then being king is not the greatest thing to be’….

And so the king  sent riders out to find the greatest thing to be but they all came back empty handed.

Did he chop off them head?

No, he forgot…’cos he began to sicken even more and pine for the greatest thing to be until it was all he could think about…

He didn’t even ask for his mirror to be bought to him anymore.

Time passed. The king kept searching. Every day the riders went out and every evening they returned empty handed and still he forgot to chop off their heads.

He let himself be anxious when they left and depressed when they returned. He ate when he was hungry and slept when he was tired.

One day the slave girl had bought him some treat or other, kitchens have to be kept busy, and as she put it down she accidently knocked over the king’s great goblet, the punishment for which was death.

Instinctively, the king caught it before it hit the ground. Not because it was his great goblet but because he didn’t want the girl to get in trouble. And so he came to realise that the one that was greater than himself was the one who cared about more than being a king.

And in that moment a swath of  geese flew into the evening sky calling to one another in such tones of belonging that he forgot about being king altogether.

So he gave the girl the goblet. She put it near Her altar and thought about him from time to time.

 

Dream Ride 2

So, you were telling your own dream.

Yeah, about the truncated boys that had been felled by trees and the dark pool of depression.

What did it all mean?

I didn’t know, but it occured to me that I knew of just such a dark pool in the forest. I might go there and stay a while and see what happened.

You went in the forest at night! Are you crazy. Wot? No tent or nuffin’?

I didn’t want to camp. I was just waiting -in-respect-of-the-truncated-boys.

You frikkin mad, dude.

You go through phases,

phases of AAAARROOOOO

Yay, i’m here doing spiritual stuff!

keeping out of the wind…

wandering about,

keeping out of the wind…

cogitating.

keeping out of the wind…

not cogitating,

keeping out of the, fuck! this is boring…

And cold

What the fuck were you thinking its winter…

Cant go back yet,

Too right, last train went 4 hours ago.

You’d have been a wuss anyway.

So, I gave in eventually and let myself be there, happy in the knowledge that it was closer to dawn than dusk. I fell asleep all curled up in the roots of a great oak tree beside the dark pool and while I slept I dreamt three dreams.

In the first, I had come to a half way house for young retarded men who were now all well and had great beards. Then I dreamt that these lads fished a great wealth of fish from the pool and finally that the pool was drained by The Ancient One who was also my grandfather.

Whoa, top dreams, dude! What does it all mean?

Waal, the crucial thing was that I went home feeling resolved.

Without understandin’ nuffink!

The thing with the repeating dream is not simply what it means but what’s my response? There is a difference between receiving a letter and answering the door.

 

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.