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Death Stories.

Some say you can tell a People by the way they treat the women. Others, by how they treat their children, or their animals. In other words Culture has to do with the degree of relatedness to the Other.

The ultimate other is Death.

and cultural attitudes towards death are going to tell us much more about ourselves than the PR pamphlet used to fob off tourists.

You could say that Western attitudes are characterised by denial but that would be to further deny the sheer trouser compromising terror that typifies our otherwise correct and cheery outlook.

A story that  parodies our relationship with mortality is from Grimm’s, ‘The boy who set out to shudder’. Our hero sallies forth to find the meaning of fear. He spends the night beneath a gallows where seven men twist in the cold wind. He cuts the corpses down and builds a fire to warm them but they just ignite so he puts them back, cursing them for their carelessness.

He spends the next night in a haunted castle where he daringly plays cards with ghosts. When the bottom half of a man falls down the chimney he calls up for the other half to follow..

could it be a sub-space disruption, chief?

.. a magical bed that takes him on a hell raising ride around the castle is met with cries of, ‘More, more’. He plays skittles with skulls and leg bone nine pins.

or a dimensional shift caused by thoron emissions in the plasma field?

On the third night he encounters six men carrying a coffin containing his dear cousin whom he tries to revive. When the corpse starts choking him he slams the lid down, angry at his ingratitude.

some kind of anomaly in the space/time continuum, perhaps?

An old man arrives having heard all the noise. Our hero traps him by his beard and beats him with an iron rod until he reveals the castle’s treasure.

And so he’s rich enough to marry the princess who soon so tires of him going on about wanting to learn how to shudder that she pours a basin of cold water, full of wriggling gudgeon, all over his head.

So he learns how to shudder, but not the meaning of fear.

Yawn.

..or something induced by tri-phasic malfunction, maybe?

He seems to have it all. He gets the girl and the castle, but he really fails in his quest. He is satisfied with the concretisation of change rather then the real thing, the cold shock of gudgeon water rather than the cold shock of aqua vita, the spirit of life that impels us across its thresholds into the unknown.

A gudgeon is a slang word for someone who is easily deceived, a gullible dupe, a sucker, the underbelly of our hero’s narcissistic refusal to really be in a world which refuses to be surmounted by his own efforts. He is therefor someone who is easily put off the scent and easily led because he his not rooted in the givens of life..

Setting out to shudder is so grandiose. Its like, ‘some of my best friends are black, or gay…’ Its all waaay over-sold, a piece of ‘reaction formation’, a defensive strategy used to ward off experience by assuming the opposite. It reveals itself in the sweeping gesture, exaggerated sincerity and is..

..’a walking power principle. By pleasing others we are better able to manipulate them, albeit unconsciously.’ M Woodman.

Our hero has an agenda.

His subtext is not to face death but to cheat death.

severe malfunction in life support, captain.

Some cheat death with suicide, they think to transcend death by being its author. A tad ironic given the end result. But there is another way to do it. Stay out of life. Sit on the bleachers where no-one can call time on you. Don’t experiment or wonder, don’t risk anything or invest in anybody. Pour cold water and gudgeons on every innovation.

Be the Death Mother’s patsy.

I recently attended a meeting to see what ideas there might be for a joint venture. After a few minutes one jumped up..

in high dudgeon..

‘we’ve done it all before,!’ he announced and marched out.

Oh dear.

It must be crap. It was crap before and it will be crap again.

Death Mother pours cold water and dudgeon gudgeons over every body.

I could have pointed out that his logic precluded him ever having sex with his wife again, or getting up in the morning, for that matter. Imagine the deadness produced by a looped subliminal tape that says, ‘there’s nothing new in the world.’

The Horror.

but there seemed no point and all I could do was wipe his gudgeons off me and allow him to flee the prospect of something unscripted from happening.

Our hero’s treatment of the corpses as if they were alive and in need of warming is more than denial, its a break with reality brought on by excessive pre-occupation with his own little world.

‘Life becomes death longing when all longing else be vain…’ Sophocles

a life whose goal does not go beyond the limited needs of the personality, namely the propping up of itself at all costs, is not worth living. When we depersonalise others, the ‘ungrateful cousin’, the ‘careless corpses’, and relate to others as a means to an end, we lose connection to ourselves and weaken our own internal cohesion, we lose meaning, identity and the sense of our place in the world.

By contast we have the story of Skeleton Woman from Inuit culture. In this story the hero is a fisherman who foul hooks Skeleton Woman, lying at the bottom of the sea. When he sees what he’s caught he runs back to his igloo in blind terror but skeleton woman is all caught up in the line and bounces along behind him.

Once home, the fisherman takes some pity on Skeleton Woman and begins to unravel the line that is caught about her. He straightens her bones and makes her comfortable. In the night he cries a single tear which skeleton woman drinks. She takes out his heart and beats it like a drum, calling for the flesh to return to her bones… then she climbs in next to him…

impulse engines and thrusters back on line, captain.

Dragging something up from the depths is a metaphor. It heralds the new possibility, fresh awareness, or the surfacing of something discarded or suppressed. Its hard work and its scary. The new thing is always the death of the old…

whatever it is.

”the person who begats something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths…and when they rise to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in their eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life.” W. Otto.

The fisherman has the good sense to be terrified but he can’t get away from her. She bounces along behind him, nameless dread, the theme of many a dream on the cusp of rude awakening.

Tricorders recalibrating..

The fisherman reflects on the situation. He sees her all tangled up. He teases the line from her toes and then from her other bones. He re-members Death. He gets out of the comfort zone that change requires and allows into his consciousness that which now need not hijack his destiny. He tends her, instead.

Life is made meaningful by our participating in its mysteries. We’re not here to find answers or to laugh in the face of danger. At some point the questing hero has to bow before the mystery.

‘Unpalatable as it is, mystery forces itself upon the mind of the enquirer, not as a cloak for ignorance but as an admission of the inability to translate what s/he knows into the everyday speech of the intellect.’ CG Jung

We’re here to participate, to be wrenched by the realisation that love and death are first cousins, to make visible whatever we have inside us. To be unknowing of purpose and direction…

a story that emphasises this aspect of many death stories is an amplification of the Inuit story, ‘the Juniper Tree’ in which a young boy is murdered by his mother and turned into sausage. His horrified and desperate sister, Marlinchen, gathers up his bones beneath the table, wailing terribly. She folds the bones into her best hankercheif and goes out of doors crying tears of blood. She lays down under the Juniper tree and falls asleep. While she sleeps a magical bird appears in the tree and flies off with the bones in its beak….

ship’s systems running normally..

Eventually the boy is restored, the wicked mother gets a millstone dropped on her head by the (very strong) bird and there is new life, but only by the strength of  Marlinchen’s love which makes her brave in the face of fear and determined in her sacred task.

Her courage is not the absence of fear. She uses it to inform her of what is important and what she needs to do in that moment. Fear is trying to draw attention to priority.

snake alert.

If we demonise it we will simply experience it as fear of one another instead and rob ourselves of instruction in the process.

plus there will still be a snake in the room.

 

 

 

How to be a Brat.

Apparently, the Papua New Guineans have thousands of languages, over a quater of all the languages on the planet are spoken on this one fairly small chunk of land…

How come?

I mean, apart from the arduous climbing across razor sharp mountain ranges covered in brambles to get to a destination at which you might wind up on the host’s menu?

What does having a language for every village say about them?

Well, they don’t get about much.

They don’t need to.

Something common to these disparate groups is a sysem of kinship so elaborate that who you can marry is veeeery limited. They remain un-entangled by the tendrils of excessive option.

Who you get to be with is pretty much a done deal. So, no frenetic dating or anxious wondering if your new beau is ‘the One’. No eternal wandering or having to make the ‘right’ choice from overwhelming eligibility, further disoriented by the tidal wash of hormones induced by fantasies of unlimited potential partners.

You can sit back.

And needn’t learn the languages further than the bend in the river.

Sometimes its not just practical but psychologically more healthy to have less. Children feel more relaxed when choices are made simple and adults find it easier to establish their priorities.

Too many options smacks of being fobbed off. The promise of endless choice is compensation for something, a prelude to manipulation. We are collectively the spoilt brat who has too much, sent mad by excess,  whilst only able to cast about symbolically for what is really needed.

And so we consume rather than feed. Rather than feel the emptiness such that something might come of it, we concretise it into a cupboard of 126 pairs of shoes, the longing for that holiday destination, lottery win fantasises, dream guy, latest gadget, must have….

or just the mundane dreary crud of eternal dissatisfaction.

You should have more.

And its true.

I once asked an African man at a rural bus stop in Matabeleland when the bus would come.

‘Today’, he assured me.

You should have more of that.

The problem with our deification of the persona, culminating in the dark cults of  Celebrity, Bling and Political Correctness, is not simply that it is frivolous.

It’s that it cannot help but oppress you for your own good. Firstly, because it assumes everyone else is an idiot, a role to which many will gladly abdicate and  children in particular are liable to embrace as life’s expectation of them.

But mostly its because any conviction that one has arrived to the point where personal epiphany is codified and exported at the end of a gun has only one thing left to acheive.

Death.

The dying without falling down variety of death.

Or maybe that too.

Either way Nature will be done with you.

and we wonder why our culture is anxious.

The fear of death itself (second only in terror to the thought that one might be condemned to sit on a cloud and forced to learn an instrument forever) is one we can scarcely catch from the corner of our eye. Death is something that happens to other people.

Yet there is something way scarier than death.

”The refusal of the loan of life because of the debt of death.” V. Frankl.

This ‘no-ological neurosis’ to paraphrase Frankl, is the provisional life, the narcissistic paddy that eternally wants it’s options and the tossing of everything out of the pram that goes with the wish to be ignorant, counter spiraling into the sweaty warmth of Them, who’ll grant that wish to be alleviated of life’s cares…

but at the expense of aliveness itself.

‘There is only one thing that I fear, not to be worthy of life’s suffering’. F. Dostoevsky.

We clamour for freedom forgetting what it entails, or intuiting it sufficiently to quietly substitute the project of exercising life’s sparkly options instead, pursuing the life that maximises choice, even if having seven types of cola or peanut butter means the oppression, subjugation and un-freedom ofself and others.

It suits us to believe that our freedom, if not our worth and redemption, is rooted in having as much time for pouring over life’s infinite catalogues that the day will allow. It suits us because we need not reflect too long or hard on our actual lack, the loss that goes with not following your own star, the disclaimers we want divine signatures for before we risk stepping the crooked miles that are the Way.

Freedom has never been about having all you want or doing whatever you please despite intense media pressure upon us to swallow such values as tomorrow’s possibility whilst slapping our wrists for stepping out of line today.

What we think of as freedom is actually a form of mental slavery.

The lifestyles we largely espouse, codified in statutes like the right to pursue happiness, as if it were a thing, are really no more than a constitutional promise to look the other way whilst we satisfy the regressive need to have seven types of cheese on our pizza…

….provided you live in debt as a wage slave and swallow the cheese on the nine o’clock news along with your dinner.

The fact that we’re living with chronic anxiety, and attacking the world that contains us as our best solution to the problem, gets all shmeered over withpromises of…

the glittering Thing.

The next lover, the dream holiday, the perfect job.

‘The sun will come out tomorrow, so you got to hang on till tomorrow come what may! Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow.’ Barbra Striesland.

Despit all the in-fighting Christianity, Islam and Judaism, all have something in common, the loss of the Divine Feminine has produced an unwitting failure to live in the present a veiw symbolically ensconced in their respective visions of Paradise.

For the Christians… Heaven is the future paradise. The meek shall inherit… tomorrow.

For the Jews… One day, my son, one day God will keep his Covenant with his Chosen people…

And Islam goes even further, with promises of more virgins than you could possibly need or get through to anyone martyring themselves for Allah…at some point.

Manyana.

In the meantime put your shoulder to the wheel. We’ll stuff you like geese from the front whilst we shaft you like dogs from behind .

Monkey Business.

When I was a kid growing up in Zambia we used to go visit a local zoo/nature reserve outside Lusaka called ‘Mundawanga’. I privately called it ‘Mundawanka’ because the Vervet monkeys were always masturating…

and would look you bang in the eye while they were at it.

There were a dozen or so males of various ages in a cage the size of your living room, all with their dicks out…..

all day…

every day.

In their cramped and unnatural captivity, all pressed together in a space not suitable territory for one, they had found a neurotic solution to their claustrophobic situation. After all, as every good Vervet knows, the correct behaviour when encounetring someone having a wank is not to encroach. Leave them alone and let them get on with it.

Space and separation…

which is good..

But rubbing yourself raw…

not good.

The monkeys were also great thieves. Loss of territory had led to loss of honour, relatedness and rules of engagement. Everyone was fair game.  Woe betide any young child with a bar of Aero who thinks he can go put his fingers through the mesh and hang on the wire cage. They know about pockets and will fleece you something rotten.

The Single System system, concentrated power in concentrated space, is just like that monkey cage. They all have their dicks out and will rob you in a heartbeat.

Concentrated power in concentrated space breeds paranoia throughout the cage and the need for space which, barring despair, only compulsive behaviour will give you.

Back in the day, some Pacific Islanders ritually killed their kings once in a while. Any one who wanted to be king could nominate themselves. One would be chosen and for a year he would enjoy all kinds of inflated priviledges and being above the law…..

until your twelve months is up.

Then you get handed a sharp knife. Sometimes you get to have sex at the shaky end of a log pile.

And then they start over..

which seems like a very sensible thing to do.

Culturally, the killing of the king brought fruitfullness to the land and life to the people. Psychologically, it induced an encounter with the archetype of Kingship itself, for anyone can step forward. It would be both terrifying in its awesome power and seduction, overwhelming with its fantasy of limitless possibility, acrid with the fumes of death…

…like Galadriel’s encounter with the Ring.

which is why we prefer the Single System system whether its skull cap or dog collar. We can depend upon it to help us suppress our experience of numinosity for the sake of our ontological security.

‘Religion is a defense against the experience of god.’ CG Jung.

We need our all-powerful and oppressive Caesars who constantly behave as though they were above the law, like Gods, so that we need not differentiate too closely between what to render to one and what to render to the other. We do this despite the loss to our own inner journeying and the raw rub of eternally marking time that this will cost us.

It is our version of the Vervet’s neurotic solution. The loss of inner creative space that is the price of abdicating a personal relationship with Psyche leads to endless masturbation, thievery and the kind of frenetic apathy, the aggrieved restlessness that is the curse of any child who is both intruded upon by a parent/state/zoo keeper whilst simultaneously being abandoned by it….

the monkey in the equation develops a quite understandable conscientious objection to reality.

Any moment that might still retain a bit of it must be evaded with all speed..

‘and so he mounts his horse and gallops furiously in every direction… ruthless in the destruction of potentials that must mature in their own form and season..’ F Wickes.

The effect on relatedness and creativity is catastrophic….

I once lived in a tiny English village in which there was a little old lady with a title and a massive house. She had been raised in a cage even more gilded than mine. Her capacity for relatedness was shot to pieces. She was a millionaire but the neighbour’s kids had to pay to use her tennis court. I fixed her flat tyre for which she immediately thrust a bottle of wine at me, unable to bear the bonds of simple co-operation. I had to be paid off directly.

Her grasp of other’s needs was catastrophically warped. A local man found a disraught motorist at the side of the narrow lane that wound steeply up through the village. He was clearly distressed.

‘Are you all right?’

”No, I broke down at the foot of the hill but a little old lady offered to tow me up.”

‘Oh dear, you didn’t accept?’

”Yes.”

‘Much damage?’

…..  All the energy that might have gone into something nourishing builds up and turns back on whatever, or whoever, is handy. The dissociated potential has grown horns and a tail. Genuine feeling or inspiration gets dumbed down into moods, knee jerk reactions and wild low gear ratios.

though the smooth and satisfied surface of the inner millpond that is the inheritance of God’s chosen people remains unruffled.

But without being affect-ed, there is no affect-ion.

No being rooted in love.

and so we too become masturbating monkeys having passed up…

‘the troublesome germ of individual king/queen ship.’ F Wickes.

Around about the time that humanity started caging monkeys they also started caging kids.

sacrificial dormitories.

Mine really did have cages on the windows. Grenade screens. Our pre-eminence as the kids of the White elite rulers made attack from African terrorists (people who didn’t like us taking over their country) a very real threat. I spent many a night standing guard over other sleeping teens, armed with a lee-enfield .303 rifle and listening for any sound.

Bling has this tradition of sending the kids away, as a display of wealth and obeisance to the centralised power. The very real suffering involved propitiates the Gods and eases parental paths to greatness.

Children become fetishistic objects sacrificed on the altar of Bling. Inner Nobility is projected onto glittering others and then chased after. And you do it yourself. You buy into it. I remember my initial pride and the look in people’s eyes when I told them where I went to school. The lurch of respect, the sage nodding, the rush of power whilst simultaneously knowing, completely and entirely, that it was a crock of shit.

where we wanked and stole.

If not each other’s stuff then each other’s pride and dignity, tutored in deception and some being more equal than others.

We think we’re a child friendly society but along with the chihuahua…

”we have the fairly universal civilised belief that a child’s impulses need to be curbed in order to make him social.” J. Liedloff.

This is germane even at the liberal end of the spectrum. We have the basic..

”assumption that the child has an antisocial nature, in need of manipulation to become socially acceptable.” ibid

When this fails, Freud’s infantile sexuality theory sets the seal on the stupid thing breaking itself. Parental influence and cages are written out of the equation. The Church loves it because it chimes so well with original sin. And so for the first time in two thousand years Church and Science agree on something.

You are the bad seed.

So that’s how you will grow.

But not as fast as we can build correctional facilities to house yo’ ass.

 

 

 

On Wallowing-in-Self-Pity.

Feeling-Sorry-for-Yourself is a curious beast. In his more malign aspect and having swallowed down something nasty, he is Wallowing-in-Self-Pity, a terrible sight, altogether smidging and grimbly. But if you were to stumble across him on the forest floor in the course of your travels, you might be in for a treat, despite his unpleasant demeanor….

and smell.

For if he manages to cough up…

the thing..

…..that now so chokes and deadens…..

…if he can wretch, if he can allow the feeling of being a wretch, if he can be persuaded to nurse the honest feeling of being unloved, then he will turn into an entirely different creature before your very eyes…..

..so different, he will have to introduce himself all over again.

Compassion-for-Self.

Feeling into the world of being unloved is the beginning of love. So you musn’t drive Wallowing away, or beat him with sticks. Strangely, if you are lucky enough to come across him cowering in the bushes and bewailing loud enough for you to prepare yourself for the terrible sight…

be kind.

be excited…..

He is no Jabberwock to simply be slain.

Just prod him gently with your stick from a safe distance to let him know you are there and then find a comfy spot.

Take out your sandwiches and wait.

The Madness of Caesars.

Around the time that the Roman Empire made itself Holy and Emperor Constantine became the first Pope, historians noticed a rather disturbing trend in the leadership..

they were all mad as hatters.

it was partly down to inbreeding but mostly it was about having unlimited power over more than imagination could encompass.

‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Machiavelli.

and it corrupted them in some curious and interesting ways. Caligula made his horse a senator. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, largely because he’d set the blaze himself, just to see what happened. When challenged on this he displaced the blame onto a new and unpopular sect called Christians, rounded up every one and fed them to wild animals,

‘a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of “hating the human race.” Tacitus.

and so he had them torn apart and burned for evening torches to light the Coliseum before announcing himself God.

Wiki have an entry for ‘mental ilness in monarchs’. You have to scroll a bit. Edward II seized power by the imaginative route of assassinating his father with a red hot poker.. up his bum.

Charles VI  of France thought he was made of glass.

Vlad the Impaler had a thing for …well, impaling.

but the list does seem a tad conservative. Notable exceptions include Louis the Sun king of France who needed the daily adulation of 400 hand picked spectators, nobles all, to witness the amazing feat of him slicing the top off his boiled egg at breakfast.

Huzzah!

and then there was Catherine the Great who had a thing about horses, the well-hung stallion kind. Unfortunately it was the death of her and not in the way you might think. Having endured the girth of his member the queen was crushed by the entire beast, accidently dropped by rope and harness bearing servants who must have momentarily found something else to do with their hands.

And dear Leopold II of Belgium who enslaved the entire Congolese people in their own country , mutilating and murdering them by the millions. That’s a bit mad.

….but there must have been some good ones, what about Richard the wossname, LionHeart….?

You mean the great liberator of the City of Acre in 1191 who butchered 2,700 civilian prisoners bound hand and foot…?

or..or..or.. Charlemagne, yeah he built Uninversities an’ stuff.

….architect supreme of the Dark Ages who entrenched and consolidated a paralysing system of feudalism that would persist for 500 years until the er.. social levelling of the Black Death.

Not to mention his little tea party in the forests of Verdun 782 AD, where 4,500 enemy saxon prisoners were decapitated one by one…, not because they were enemies who’d tried to kill him and would do so again given half a chance but because they refused to sniff the glove and convert.

This system, with its mad monarchs has not changed with the democratizing of nations. In fact Democracy is a stage of its evolution, currently in its underground puppating stage, like a big fat Witchety grub. The old kings take off their crowns, retire quietly, marry into money, themselves, and carry on behind closed doors. They have ‘extensive portfolios’ and pull the strings of government just like before…

except on silent running..

and now veiw the battle not from the traditional nearby hill atop a white charger, but by drone, whose feed you can veiw by the pool half a world away..

if you can be arsed.

There seems to be something inevitable about the madness of monarchs.

But why? And why is nearly 90% of Wiki’s list of mental monarchs the various glittery crowns of Western civilisation?

Only one crazy Chinese Emperor, though he was a real humdinger. Quianfei, who had a taste for eyeballs in honey and regularly had his female relations raped  while he watched. Those that resisted in any way were beheaded. When his advisors protested he ordered them to commit suicide.

Curiously the record contains a final note on Quianfei..

..that he dreamt of a woman prophesying his death within the year on account of his entirely ungoverned passions.

He duly succumbed.

No African kings on the list. Idi Amin doesn’t count. He only imagined that he was the last king of Scotland.

The, ‘ how do they get so crazy?’ question is easier to address than, ‘ why do we have it like this’?

In nearly all other kingship systems around the world the king is a custodian of the nation and there to ratify natural law, the law of Harmatia, the Principle of Relatedness. In the West the king does not ratify, he codifies the law. He conceptualises it and then lives above it.

King David rapes Bathsheba and  orders her husband Uriah into the thick of battle to ensure his death. Natural law doesn’t apply to him. Without relatedness he becomes unhinged.

but its allowed, so long as you’re sorry..

and worship no other gods..

yes, and worship no other gods…..

whom we shan’t mention…or name.

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…

More important than describing how this happens is why we’d have such inflated leadership in the first place.

And I’m afraid the answer is because its convenient to have distant others rule our fate. We don’t have to evolve. We can project all the symbols, responsibilities and struggles for human value and meaning onto celebrity, wealth and power.

and be their bitches.

”So long as we are blind to the inner tyrant, we blame an outer tyrant when we fall into darkness”. M. Woodman.

… loading them down with the myriad archetypal projections that constitute those deepest hopes and aspirations of a people. The mental monarchs and celeb equivalents are psychically cut to pieces by the collective claws of a nation’s disowned individuation. In what Moore and Gillet call ‘the Abdication Syndrome’, we live in a culture where others are elected to ‘make it’ on our behalf. We bask in their regal glow and participate vicariously in a fantasy of acclaim and adulation..

whilst having to do nothing.

Strangely…

the rare hope of newborns.

 

 

The King’s secret Curse.

Dying is a tricky business. Even at the best of times..

if there is such a thing as a good day to die.

There are no rehearsals to attend and no on-line courses you can download. We know we have to go and that we can’t know when, just that it gets increasingly likely. There is no wrong time or unfair moment.

Having banished the containing vessel of the Great Mother who might make a better job of consolation where it’s needed rather than the other side of bikes for Christmas, the horror of it all is just too much to bear…

and so we quietly collude with the crippling expectation to be someone else’s golden child, or their whore, and find some croutons of succor and semblance of omnipotence over death in the shared identity, the participation mystique of the collective self, the inheritance of dashing, archetypal roles, though they do like the easy way out and would just as soon you fell asleep in the snow.

In Greek mythology king Midas is given Ass’s ears by Apollo as a poetic affliction for this tendency of the golden child to collude with the very thing that prevents him from being himself, the heady cocktail of mother’s ambition fizzing with the instinct to acheive his own potential…

see if you can get that right…

all puffed up with this unholy expectation, Midas stupidly questions Apollo’s judgement in a music contest.

So Apollo zaps him with Ass’s ears as if to say, ‘lets see if you can hear better with these’…

and maybe the God is simply making visible what just happened..

LO, HE HEEDS A DRUMMER NOT HIS OWN..

Midas has been contaminated by some psychic content that doesn’t belong to him such that he would speak to the God as though he were one himself.

The Ass has long been associated with the Divine Feminine and in its horned aspect as Unicorn, the Self.

being slapped with such a pair of ears is going to give you the mother complex from hell.

and whilst it might preserve from overdue concern about niggly things like mortality or life’s meaning and purpose in the meanwhile, it also devours his essential humanity from within and gives him instead the living death of being a bit player whose actions, attitudes, goals and ambitions are now no longer his own…

and whilst he functions perfectly well, and swans Elysian fields unbegnighted by either death’s spectre or the risk of an unprotected life, that life is still someone else’s.

Midas tries to keep this from being known and swears his barber to secrecy. But the poor man is overwhelmed by the burden of such a secret and whispers it into a hole in the ground. Reeds grow up. A musician cuts one for a flute and the first notes played tell the story….

Not only is the Emperor naked, he is not his own man.

Eaten up from within.

The idea that a psychopathic adaptation, the beginning of Narcissism, is simply because of the absence or lack of something is not unlike the Catholic doctrine of ‘Privatio Boni’, that evil is the privation of good. Clever old Augustine. What a lad. He gets to terrify you with visions of hell and damnation whilst dismissing Satan with a papal bull that says he’s not a real thing.

I ALONE AM MIGHTY.

The Psychoanalytic proponents of deprivation as causal in Narcissistic Personality Disorder are at the liberal end of this spectrum.

More  hardcore than Augustine.

You did it to yourself.

We’ll pay lipservice to..

‘the lack of a sufficient containing environment..’ Lederman

and in the next breath will say that..

‘a baby who experiences the breast as noxious can barricade itself off from the mother…’ ibid

You are the problem. You barricaded yourself.

all of which precludes the possibility of being noxiously fed.

‘Not so readily do we give up what we drink with our mother’s milk’. Dostoevsky.

And so despite ideological differences the Pew and the Couch agree on a fundamental issue.

You are bad.

In fact, because of the restrictions placed on her, mother buries her own deep treasure in the vessel of her child, in lieu of being able to realise it in her own lifetime. Like an ancient priestess burying forbidden sacred things in earthenware jars…

for the future….

sometimes the story of the whispered secret and the reed flute surface like the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi, and other times, less fortunately, mother’s inheritance, made necessary by the oppression of her own sacred heart, comes to fruition as a big fat psychiatric label.

‘One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power … If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.’ Marie-Louise von Franz

This story of unlived possibility finds collective expression principle in the ancient Talmudic rendering of the story of the Flood.

Its way more interesting than our version.

yeah, tales of unresolved conflict, desecration and betrayal an’ fings…

So, the story goes that only the great and the good get into the Ark as you’d expect and all the sinful who foolishly wanted to live life on their own terms were summarily deluged and drowned.

Bastards.

Buuut…. The Unicorn, aka She who must not be named

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…

..who was so huge that only Her nose could fit on the Ark, was lashed to the side of the craft and towed along in the waves.

there’s more…

Lashed onto the other side of the hull was a giant, the mighty king Og of Dashan. Like Midas with his affliction from elsewhere stuck onto him, these Beings that had to be suppressed for consciousness to be ‘afloat’, plague the Ark on both sides.

the return of the repressed..

The Patriarchal barge finds itself afflicted by archetypal contents it hoped to leave behind but now has to deal with in their less sophisticated animal and giant forms.

It turns out Og is a descendant of the original angels kicked out  of Heaven for siding with you know who. He called the city he founded after the flood, ‘Ashtaroth’ in honour of,

…Wass’ername.

And so the Ark is carrying a great secret, hidden in the rolling waves, living symbols of the Sacred Feminine and her son lover, the very pair

at which the flood was aimed..

them and their sort..

but half submerged, exhausted, vengeful, and most dangerously, adhered to consciousness rather than a part of it and manifesting in an undifferentiated destructive way that dogs our culture. Marion Woodman calls it the ‘Death Mother, the critical inner Harpie that kills innovation, novelty, enthusiasm, which pours cold water on spontaneity, spreads doubt and clips wings and turns life to stone, the fate of Midas’ daughter whom he accidently turns to gold.

This phenomenon is quietly endemic in our society. A recent survey of one hundred elderly folk were asked about their greatest regret. Their response was unanimous.

and not for some rash act or sinful shortcoming but for the self they had failed to become, the things they’d talked themselves out of doing, the aliveness they’d choked off, the beat of their own drummer that Ass’s ears had stopped them hearing.

Baba Yaga and the Wooden Child

There is a Jewish joke about a mother and son out for a day on the pier when a wave comes along and washes the boy out to sea…

too close to the edge…

The horrified woman turns to a crowd of fellow daytripers carefully stood a sensible twenty metres further back and screams…

”Who will save my baby….?’

After much shuffling of feet a hero steps forward, strips off and dives into the furious brine. After an eternity of battling mountainous seas our brave swimmer drags the half drowned boy from the foam.

Mother scampers across the pebbles, takes one impassive look at her bedraggled son before turning angrily to the saviour,  ”and the hat?”

Deeper than the expectation to be helped in her plight is a bedrock of belief that says life is always disappointing. Not even having her child restored to her can shake this conviction.

The hero goes away feeling like a failure but what of the boy? Can you imagine what it must be like trying to live up to the expectations of such a mother on a daily basis?

…perhaps that he somehow has to keep mother herself afloat…?

Is that how he managed to find himself so close to the jaws of danger in the first place? Flushed with heroic power and entitlement?

i cannot drown and drown me now

What symbiotic, omnipotent collusion between mother and son places him so close to the edge?

He is carrying something, or rather, being run by something,a construct so powerful, so destructive, that it overrides the instinct for self-preservation.

But, what?

Parental expectation might parade as ‘I only want what’s best for you,’ but it has a pernicious and hidden aspect that impacts on the child and shapes Being itself, one powerful enough to warrant the construction of narcissistic defences.

answer the frikkin question, expectation of what?

..that the child lives out and fulfills the secret and unintegrated aspects of the parental psyche…that s/he carry parent’s archetypal expectations, do heroic deeds on their behalf and redeem them from their fate. Nature abhors a vacuum and top of the inheritance ledger for kids is the dubious legacy of their parents’ unlived lives. All of which leaves the child with a mechanical or wooden approximation of their own.

A story that shows us how this happens comes from Russia. It is one of many  about Baba Yaga and Vassilisa the Brave.

In this version of the story a childless couple wrap a log of wood in a blanket. The old man chisels a babe from the wood which becomes the child, Vassilisa.

We have the expression ‘a chip off the the old block’ for a person carrying on the legacy or destiny of another, their own unfolding compromised.

Such a child grows super-alert to signs of parental expectation since their emotional world depends upon anticipation of the chisel’s line.

‘If you project the shadow long enough, it will appear.” CG Jung.

…all the disallowed parental creativity, sexuality and symbols of spiritual life will be picked up by the child. Once they’ve taken root in a psyche other than the one that spawned them these contents are bound to lend that life an automated and perfunctory appearance as spontaneous being is swallowed up by efforts to compete for affection with the idea of itself, intojected from the other.

Jung tells the story in his autobiography of a local girl he knew who became a prostitute. He knew the family, a puritannical wife and a henpecked husband who seemed to share only a loathing of the body. The daughter was loaded down with all the unintegrated, primitive sexuality in the family. Once she grasped that her motivation to prostitute herself had been unconsciously engendered in her and that she was living out her parents’ shadow, she got a day job.

If the child is a’ blockhead’, ours to mould or carve, when we fail to trust her own innate knowing of how to be, then the child’s instinct to live up to expectations becomes a cruel trap.

because the expectation is to betray herself….

‘My Mother said, I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood.
Your hair shan’t curl and your shoes shan’t shine,
You gypsy girl, you shan’t be mine!’ Children’s folk song

What happens when someone says, ‘be nice’…?

especially, three seconds before knocking on the door of the people you’re about to have dinner with…?

Why would you say such a thing unless deep down you felt that I was not nice and had to be reminded to bolt social convention onto my rough hide?

I’m expected not to be nice.

Ok, so… that’s what I’ll be. The instinct for social co-operation pays more attention to conviction than imperative.

Vassilisa is told,  ‘don’t go into the forest whatever you do’,..

..you stupid wooden headed girl who is bound to just wander off…

and so she does.

Such expectations..

’cause much traffic in lost child departments and when mixed with a ‘watch out, you’ll hurt yourself!’ promise, a good number of drownings, serious falls and road accidents.” J Liedloff.

At a local independent senior school a teacher become so frustrated with students loosing their pens that she buys a barrel of them and sets it up at the front of the class. After a week all the pens are gone but still nobody has one….

the underlying reality is that the kids are being excessively babied by the teacher’s unconscious needs. They aren’t expected to be responsible. So they aren’t, their maturity is gobbled up by Baba Yaga, cruising the playground in her ‘hut on hen’s legs’…

on the lookout for tasty boys and girls.

Baba Yaga is somewhat like Kali from Hindu tradition only Kali is also depicted giving birth as well as devouring her babies. In the West the fragmenting of the Divine Feminine has lead to a more demonic, chaotic version of the goddess, contaminated with unlived potential that lends millenial weight behind mundane situations.

Parent and child on a garden path.. the child is fascinated with all the bugs…  sees one, a big beetle and goes over to inspect it. Mother shouts, ‘don’t kill it!’ The child stops short having learned something new and unpleasant about herself. The beetle survives but the child’s curiosity does not. It lies crushed upon the path.

To whatever extent the parent prescribes for the child some fragment of their own forbidden heart they devour the child’s own unfolding life by the same measure.

Baba Yaga captures Vassilisa. The child is overwhelmed by unintegrated parental shadow..

worthless child…!

and archetypal expectations to fix everything that is wrong in that parent’s’s life..

my hero….!

Either way Vassilisa is prevented from going further on her way through the forest.

She is in the belly of the beast….

…not quite a real girl for as long as she remains unseen apart from all the hopes and dreams and nightmares that others have invested in her which, paradoxically, her instincts for self preservation, rooted in learning by example and social expectation, are urgently trying to assimilate.

The conflict between the wish to be a real girl (but with all the hurts and betrayals of life) and the false self (with all its perks and free dinners) renders her response to life mechanical, even robotic.

she’s havin’ the life sucked out of her.

Deprivation is not just the absence of something….

not just..

‘the unfulfilled expectations of a linking (or) lack of emotional linking.’ Lederman.

It is the presence of something that is devouring, life consuming, alien.

Psychoanalysis has trouble facing this. After all Baba Yaga is pretty scary. But for the want of acknowledging the impact of parental projections with their gamut of expectations onto children the subsequent narcissistic adaptations are  bound to be made baby’s fault. The child is made to feel that she is ill because of …

‘her defence against introjecting the maternal environment…’ ibid

as though Mama was all cream puff and apple pie.

the baby is …

‘a baby that does not link….’ ibid

Perhaps, just perhaps, she had a good reason for that.

and cannot draw on good memories of infantile feeds…

hard to enjoy if its interrupting mother’s busy schedule, if she’s frustrated, depleted, crashing through the undergrowth and secretly looking to baby to make it better.. or holding baby responsible..

and so the cart is put before the horse.

‘the defences of the self prevent the baby from using any of his sense organs to introject the breast and the maternal environment.’ ibid

he died not because he was pushed from the cliffs but because he fell upon the rocks..

…and yet allowed a moment of whimsy as to the fate of Frankenstein’s monster, a more modern symbol for the constructed child, Lederman acknowledges in poetry what she cannot in psychoanalytic theory..

The constructed child..

‘on account of utter rejection and forced isolation is driven to destroy…’ ibid

If you have gone away I must have destroyed you so that is what I do. I attack myself and those I love.

Stay in the belly, it is at least a familiar hell..

though paranoid

for what else is paranoia other than poisoned expectation?

Baba Yaga holds Vassilisa the Brave for a long time. She uses the child’s instinct to live up to others’ expectations against her. Eventually, Vassilisa’s true self wins through, but only after an eternity of sweeping Baba Yaga’s hearth and fulfilling all her bidding. One day she up and stuffs Baba Yaga’s daughter in the oven, a bit like in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and escapes onto the roof during the ensuing mellee.

A passing goose, who happens to be there at the right moment, who is the right moment, carries her to safety and freedom. What seems to happen is that when something is instigated to tip the balance of life in our favour, when longing for authentic experience becomes a great need, then something unaccountable, mysterious, turns up out of the blue to save the day.

The goose is ‘avis hermetis’, Vassilisa’s own wild soul, restored to her once the spell of having to live out the destiny of another can be resolved.

With a boot.

The problem with the hut on hen’s legs as a containing vessel and the reason Vassilisa spends so long there is that for her to escape she has to trade in the heady magic of being so important to her captor, the buzz of being invested with Baba Yaga’s need. She has  begun to identify with her aggressor.

And so the burden she carries begins to feel like priviledge, her true being, which authentic feeling would contradict…

annihilate, in fact.

So tricking Baba Yaga’s daughter, the self she’s supposed to be, and escaping up onto the roof is a brush with death..

flushed with the kind of feelings you might associate with stuffing someone into an oven….

Tending The Compulsive Heart.

I’m browsing the shelves of a charity shop. Nearby, a customer is in conversation with the store manager. She has come in to collect some item that has been set aside for her.

‘I’ll just go and get it,’ asserts the manager and heads for the backroom with the kind of competance that gives bouncing babes their rosy cheeks.

‘It’s ok’, says the disgruntled customer, ‘I don’t mean to bother you.’

‘No bother,’ trills the bustling matron, now carving a confident wake across the store, the success of her task a foregone conclusion.

‘I’ll come back another time’, says the customer quietly and by the time the manager has returned with her item she has tipped herself back out into the friendless street, collar turned to the wind.

This tragic insistence that life will always thwart her intentions, so great that it must negate reality to do so, is the stuff of Monty Python sketches.

In fact it is quite funny…

But my guess is that she has lived like that on a daily basis for years…

not so funny..

every new opportunity to re-invent herself has to be passed up for yet another chance to replay the familiar and eternally dissappointing round, a groundhog life of compulsively repeated victimhood and rejection…

in the face of plenty.

Why?

A story that typifies this contemporary example and gives us some clues about it is the tale of Sisyphus, who was condemned by Zeus to push a boulder up a steep hill only to have it roll all the way back down just as he reached the top.

His labour is eternal, grinding, deathly.

It turns out that Sisyphus, begging your pardon, King Sisyphus, was an old fashioned tyrant not too different from the charity shop customer who, despite her helpless posturing, aggressively forced circumstances into a mould that violated the manager’s helpful and competant attitude, attacked her kindness and loaded her down with projections of meanness and witholding….

Albert Camus saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life and of course the compulsive repetition of self-defeating actions do seem absurd…

until we know the context.

‘In many cases the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. Therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal … secret, the rock against which he is shattered…’ CG Jung

In his autobiography Jung gives the example of a woman incarcerated for many years in the asylum who made curious rhythmic movements with her hands and arms. They were easily dismissed as meaningless. Jung decided that he had to assume they made some kind of sense and began to make enquiries, difficult given the forty years that had elapsed since her admission.

He looked again at the yellowing case notes to see the movements described as ‘cobbler’s motions’, the drawing up of threads from shoes held between the knees. When she died shortly afterwards her brother came to the funeral and Jung was able to ask when she had lost her mind. It turned out that as a young woman she had been spurned by a cobbler with whom she’d been in love, a rejection she refused to accept..

”The shoemaker movements indicated an identification with her sweetheart which had lasted until her death.” ibid

Sisyphus’ repetition of his apparently meaningless task has similarly significant antecedants.

He was greedy and deceitful. He killed travellers and guests, a violation of Xenia, the Greek Principle of Relatedness that guarenteed hospitality and protection to strangers. He commited incest with his niece Tyro, another violation of Relatedness. He also betrayed one of Zeus’ secrets for material gain.

The maddening  punishment reserved for Sisyphus was due to his conviction that he was not bound by any laws, not even the laws of Death whose chains he escapes when sent down to Hades..

Zeus poetically enchants the boulder to roll away before Sisyphus reached the top of the hill,  an eternal reminder that we are all constrained by natural laws, just as the rock is constrained by gravity.

One version of the story says he tricks Persephone to let him go back to the land of the living to punish his wife, Merope, for failing to bury him properly and refused to return, living out a second old age before dying again.

The circumstances of Sisyphus’ childhood are unrecorded but we do know he  lived circa 1200 BC just around the time that the Great Mother was being killed off in all the Mediterranean cultures. Her loss changed human values because with Her demise the Principle of Relatedness and the unwritten rules about how to treat one another are also lost and all the things we might learn at the breast about how to be with one another are eroded.

Sisyphus lived on the cusp of two worlds. His ancestors were Pelasgians, who worshipped the Great Mother, a practice ended by his father Aeolus who changed their tribal name to ‘Aeolian’, a now hellenised group who spurned the old ways. So Sisyphus was the first generation separated from the Divine Feminine.

We know that his relationship to his brother Salmoneus is one of murderous hate, the kind of hate that siblings have for one another when there is not enough mummy to go around.

His relationship with the Gods is one of trickery and deceipt. Such values are learned pre-verbally. Like the narcissistic prototype of Gilgamesh and Nebuchadnezzar, he is unmothered, internally divided from his loss, bound only by the limits of egoic desire yet empty and disconnected from the feeling tone of his inner world.

‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’ Maya Angelou.

Sisyphus grandiose posturing, his defiance of both gods and subjects is compensation for his lack of relatedness but it can’t last forever. The repressed always returns in the form of a nasty symptom, some apparently meaningless compulsion. His belief that he can defy the Gods and cheat Death by failing to return to Hades as he promised is an error eternally impressed upon him by having to return to the bottom of the hill over and over again.

His lack of self-restraint is rooted in lack of early containment. The repetition of the daily round and common task that lends security to childhood has to be replaced by a compulsive disorder which will do the containing for him.

”She had a compulsion neurosis because she could not impose moral restraint upon herself. Such people must then have some other form of restraint and along come the compulsive symptoms to serve the purpose.” CG Jung.

Camus concludes,

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.

The Obssessive follows Camus’ advice. Except for his symptom he is happy. He tries to forget his story, buries his secrets bedrock deep, betrays the sob of depth dark longing…

But his happiness is a lie…

for what happiness can there be if there is no Mother, if the premise of existence  has to be that life is absurd and the search for meaning futile?

 

 

The Fisherman’s Wife.

A man makes a romantic visit to a beauty spot with a girlfriend. She looks about her and exclaims..

‘It’s beautiful! Why have you never bought me here before?’

There’s no getting it right for such a person.

You might wonder about what makes her tick. You might make observations about the avoidance of intimacy, the refusal of gratitude, the enviously attacked moment of togetherness, the sabotage of aliveness…

and you’d be right..

but none the wiser.

A story that expresses this kind of eternal dissatisfaction is the tale of The Fisherman’s Wife. At first glance it seems like a salutary warning about the dangers of greed and an admonishment to be happy with what you have.

The story goes that the poor and luckless fisherman draws in his tattered net one day to find that he has caught the King of the Fishes who promises to grant him a wish if he sets him free.

The fisherman runs back to his filthy hovel to confer with his wife who says straight away that they should have a new house and in the blink of an eye it is done….

but the wife is…

unhappy.

It could be a bit bigger…

Off goes the fisherman to amend his wish. Even though the Fish King is a bit peeved at this shilly shallying he agrees and when the fisherman gets back the house has become a great mansion.

Buuuuuuut…

its just a matter of time before the wife wants a castle…

and a tiara

and a team of unicorns to pull her brand new golden coach…

Each time the fisherman goes back to the fish king the sea is that bit darker, the sky somehow more fierce with cloud tendrils scudded before a lashing wind.

She wants to be Queen…

She wants to be Empress…

She wants to be Supreme Ruler of the Universe..

and have a mountain of calorie free chocolate..

Finally the Fish King’s patience fails..

‘Go back to your filthy hovel!’….

and by the time the fisherman returns all is as it was..

that morning.

Just as history is unkind to the vanquished so too is it difficult to find any sympathy for the fisherman’s wife..

she was a greedy cow and got her just desserts.

Right?

Well yes, but what on earth is going on inside her that no amount of wealth and power can fill?

And by the same token, what is going on such that Consumerism in all its fetid glory has come to typify our age? We focus on the shallowness of Western gluttony..

and feel bad about it..

but consumerism and the relentless greed that drives it are not the problem.

The problem is whatever it is that all that stuff is trying to fill..

So you can slag off greedy politicians, avaricious corporations and insatiable nations without it loosening your own grip on the TV remote one iota while you continue to channel hop entire networks devoted to selling you stuff you don’t need.

from the comfort of your armchair..

or

it would be comfortable if only….

So it may be that…

‘Consumerism is the corruption of the American soul.’ B. Nicholson.

Indeed, much of the literature on Western Consumerism pitches its critique at the level of crumbling social values and greed that is

the pursuit of happiness

by twilight.

We bandy terms like ‘social impact’, and talk about the symptoms of ‘Affluenza’, which is all very interesting…

but no-one is asking what Consumerism is for….

or why the West is stuffing itself like a starvling.

What on earth are we compensating for if our almost religious devotion to posession and accumulation is so great that it gives rise to imbalances of power tantamount to the economic enslavement of entire nations…..?

because you can’t have more than you need without taking bread from the mouths of others…

and, there, now I too am wagging my finger like a schoolmaster,

forgetting the profound levels of inner despair and emptiness, the loss of worth, of self, the hopelessness that leads to such gorging of oneself.

Its so easy to hate the Glutton.

One of the greatest sins at my boarding school in colonial Africa was, ‘uys grazing’. ‘Uys’ is Africaans for ‘by himself’, or ‘alone’.

Eating on your own.

You’d have to plan it. Quickly out of Prep and fly down to the trunk room, a long corridor lined with broad slated shelving for the dozens of black metal trunks stacked nine or ten high. Mine was always on the topmost shelf, not because I had been afforded any priviledge but because my trunk was a gauche, outsize, yellow pigskin affair guarenteed to mark you out on day one as a trouble-maker.

So I’d scamper up there like a spider, way above the glow of the single light bulb on its log flex and lift the heavy lid an inch or two with my elbow whilst pawing about inside for some goody, mentally listing the inventory, checking for theft, bolting down whatever could be found..

heart pounding at the prospect of discovery.

biltong and custard creams..

crisps and chocolate.

Put some in your pocket for later, you can eat them in the toilet.

it looks compulsive, greedy, selfish…

and it is.

just the kind of behaviour you’d expect from boys raised in the absence of women, a continuation of a childhood almost entirely devoid of Mother…

in a culture where the ample lap of the Great Mother is no longer even a dim memory….

where getting properly fed feels like a cross border raid into enemy territory in which you may be ensnared at any time.

So you have to be alert….

and feed yourself..

endlessly.

‘This is our futile attempt to fill a spiritual and emotional emptiness within, to gratify some long-buried need, to heal or at least numb some festering psychological wound. Such self-defeating behaviors are rooted in formerly unmet infantile needs, childhood and adult trauma‘. S. Diamond.

And so much as we might judge and condemn the fisherman’s wife, do we have the courage to go where she could not? Can we nurse the empty child within who has already decided on the basis of experience that there is not enough to go round?

After all, embracing the inner child is not simply a matter of tears, bandaid and kissing it better. There is also the unresponsive child who wants more than you have and will give nothing back.

‘Do you love life? Then love camp life, for that too is life.” F. Dostoyevsky.

For what would love be if it were not willing to suffer everything..

to find meaning in suffering

or grace in the dirt?

Calling ourselves ‘consumers’ is the newest form of a Freudian prejudice that blames baby for not being able to find the nipple or for crying in response to being un-held.

It also keeps alive the illusion that we have got to the bottom of ourselves by confessing our ‘avarice’, by feeling guilty for feeling empty….

please Sir, can I have some more?

and thus immediately raised back up in pious inauthenticity where we join the call for an end to Greed…

that gaping maw where Mother used to be.

 

Gender and Soul Wound.

The psychopathology that attends the loss of the Great Mother seems to be different for boys and girls. I will tease these differences out by comparing two fairytales, the ‘Wild Swans’ by Hans Christian Anderson and the ‘Drummer Boy’ retold by the brothers Grimm.

In the ‘Wild Swans’, the protagonist is Elisa, a princess whose mother has died. The king remarries an awful witch who wants the kingdom all to herself. She turns Elisa’s eleven brothers into swans and banishes them to a far off land. Elisa herself is disfigured with enchanted mud (or blood) that won’t wash off. Her father can’t recognise her and she is cast out.

The swan brothers find Elisa but can’t recognise her because of the foul mud. She must rid herself of the enchantment or die trying and, following the example of a wounded deer, leaps from dangerously high cliffs into a magical pool which returns her to her former recognisable self.

Elisa is carried to safety across the sea by the brothers. She is determined to lift their spell. A crow reveals to her that she must weave jackets made of nettles, one for each prince, which will restore them to their human form. During the time it takes to weave the jackets she must not breath a word or they will all die.

She finds a secret cave in which to begin the work but no sooner has she began than a commotion outside catches her attention. A wild sow is being hunted by the young king of the land who falls in love with Elisa when she rushes out to protect the pig and her babies. He takes her to his castle where his first minister, who is in cahoots with the wicked step mother, plots against her.

The minister spies on Elisa. When she goes to the churchyard for more nettles in the night he sees his chance, wakes the king and denounces Elisa as a witch. The sorry figure of the mumbling, crying girl pulling nettles up in the dark is enough to court suspicion and when she fails to defend herself the king hands her over to the minister who announces her imminent execution .

Even as the tumbril rolls towards the gallows Elisa knits her jackets. Mice from the castle have warned the swan brothers of what has happened and they swoop in, but it is she who rescues them, changing them back into princes as soon as the jackets are cast across their wings.

The second story, the Drummer Boy, with a male protagonist who must redeem a swan maiden, is very different.

In this tale the hero finds a shift of beautiful linen by the shores of a lake and takes it. That night as he settles down to sleep he hears a distressed voice begging for the shift to be returned. It transpires that it is in fact a swan skin that the maiden must wear if she is to return to her sisters on the Glass Mountain where a wicked witch holds them all prisoner.

The boy resolves to help her. He returns the swan skin and sets out next morning for the Glass Mountain, helped by giants whom he tricks into carrying him there by saying that he is the advance guard of a great army which will attack them if they refuse.

Having arrived at the foot of the impossibly slippery mountain he finds two men fighting over a magical saddle which he steals and rides to the top with ease. Once there he finds the witch’s house and asks for board and lodging. She agrees provided he complete three chores on three consecutive days. The first is to empty a huge pond with a thimble and arrange all the fish in order of their size. The second is to chop down the forest behind the house and the third is to set the logs ablaze.

He immediately gives up saying it is impossible. Then the Swan Maiden emerges from the house and invites him to go to sleep with his head on her lap. When he wakes the chores are all done.

Drummer Boy and Swan Maiden return to his home town where he says he must visit his mother. The Swan Maiden agrees but warns him not to kiss her on both cheeks lest he forget her.

But he does kiss his mother on both cheeks..

and he does forget.

His mother chooses another bride for him and the Swan Maiden has to beg to be allowed to speak to her former fiance, efforts frustrated by a sleeping draught poured into his wine by the new bride from which she cannot wake him. Only on the third evening, when by chance he fails to drink the potion, is the drummer boy returned to his senses and his memory returns.

You could say that the wicked witch/evil stepmother in both stories represent the dark aspect of the Great Mother, intent on limiting consciousness and autonomy.

Equally, when the Principle of Relatedness personified by the Divine Feminine is repressed we can expect relationships and consciousness itself to suffer. Loss of relatedness is not just an outer phenomenon. It is also a loss of inner dialogue and a disconnection from the psyche which diminishes consciousness.

The contrasexual aspect of oneself, a man’s inner feminine and a woman’s inner masculine, become alienated from the personality, less differentiated and therefor symbolised in their animal form.

”Something is unlawfully won from, or done to Nature, which results in a curse.” M. L. von Franz. 

Erich Neumann suggests that the loss of the Goddess is a price worth paying for the increase in consciousness brought in its wake. Our stories suggest otherwise, a corresponding loss of humanity and self alienation with diminished consciousness giving rise to a….

”…personality which is split up into partial aspects, that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself ‘man’.” CG Jung.

Girl and Boy approach their shared predicament very differently. Elisa allows herself to fall from the cliff tops to wash off the enchanted mud. She descends, trusting the example of the wounded stag. She is still connected to her instincts from whom further help comes in the form of the crow who tells her the secret of the nettle jackets, the sow who inadvertantly catches the young king’s attention and the mice who warn the brothers about the minister’s treachery.

The nettle jackets are a symbol of the painful work of individuation, the sheer hard graft required to humanise and make conscious the loss of relatedness that results from the Great Mother’s banishment.

The Drummer Boy’s attitude is very different. He too must make a difficult journey but does so with smooth talk and trickery. His pretense to be at the head of an army intimidates the giants. His theft of the magical saddle carries him effortlessly up the mountain. He doesn’t have to lift a finger. And despite these fortuitous interventions he throws his hands up in despair when given his chores by the witch, declaring they can’t be done. He falls asleep in the maiden’s lap instead.

”You may ride to your highest hieght, but when you get there you will stumble.” F Nietzsche.

This kind of helpless posturing, passivity and entitlement are typical of the narcissistic, motherbound man. Despite his cleverness and trickery he lacks the resolve to do whatever he can. He avoids the despair and hard work entered into by Elisa and so his triumph is a bit academic and by-the-way, evidenced by his failure to kiss his mother only once….

…unlike Elisa whose taboo against speaking is observed throughout all her trials.

The restriction of the second familial kiss is the Swan Maiden’s demand that the Drummer Boy separate from his mother, but he can’t do it and again falls unconscious. Even his final remembering seems like an accident, all rather typical of the ‘Puer’ personality whose fate comes to him from outside and who expects to be given life on a plate.

And so he is swept along by events, freed finally not by his own efforts or courage but by the Swan Maiden’s persistence.

By contrast Elisa is entirely dynamic. She continues her work even as the dreadful tumbril rolls her to the gallows, finally redeemed by her own efforts.

All this suggests something…

and not just that women are tougher than men.

which they are…

It suggests that Consciousness blooms in adversity.

Life is not supposed to do that.

The whole theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest is predicated on the Drummer Boy’s gambit. Move away from negative stimulus towards easier less competitively disputed environs where you are bound to do better…

The subjugation of the Great Mother has had an unforseen and counter-intuitive effect….

the flourishing of feminine consciousness.