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There was once a great King who had everything he wanted. He bedded every concubine he fancied. He told people what to do. Sometimes he chopped off their heads if he was in a bad mood, or if they looked at him. He rose when he felt like it, went to bed when he wanted and ate whatever he could imagine in between. There was no-one to remind him to wash behind his ears, nor to slurp his pearls dissolved in vinegar, or wipe the blood from his bejewelled dagger.

Now, you’d think the satisfactions of such a great and mighty lord would only be exceeded by the exploits of his loins, the adventures of his voluptuous gut. Yet, it was not so. Having had every pleasure centre in his considerable frame exercised way past satiation the poor King felt bored, bored, bored.

One day, as he sat at yet another groaning table, stuffed beyond use with the toil of his subjects, he simply had enough and swept the delicacies to the floor.

‘Bring me the Cook!’

The man was bought in chains and thrown before his majesty.

” If you don’t bring me something to eat that I haven’t had before, something really satisfyingly, lipsmackingly delicious, I will have your head.’ So the Cook tried everything he could but nothing satisfied the already satiated. Not Goose flambed in peach liquor, nor tomato and basil ice cream, nor nut roast with figs and almonds. Eventually, in despair, Cook tucked a loaf of bread under his arm and fled into the forest.

Before long his escape was reported and the King gave chase with riders and hounds. Furious and famished our mighty lord drove down his exhausted subject. They found the terrified misery hiding in a tree pretending to be dead. This pretense caused him to lose his grip of the bread which fell down and rolled to the King’s feet. What manner of strange object is this? He picked it up carefully in case it was armed or had teeth. ‘It is bread your majesty, poor people’s food’. The King’s rumbling belly tweaked at his curiosity and so he took a bite… to find it was the most delicious thing he’d eaten since he was a babe in arms… which put him in such good humor he neglected to kill the man who made it.

The great debate over whether aggression is learned or innate seems to skip past the possibility that human aggression might have been conditioned by sudden changes in the weave of cultural patterning which happened somewhere in-between the imprinting of ancient instinct and the contemporary lessons of your own lifetime. Something happened within the time span of Homo sapiens which separates us utterly from ancestors which otherwise look just like us.

When social bands presided over by chiefs became cities presided over by kings, becoming ‘civilised’ was a necessary compensation for sudden increases in our collective aggression, fired into life by a new pattern of inequalities and paranoias which simply didn’t exist before. Kingship was to polarise social groups as never before into the twin tragedies of having too much and having too little.

‘There are two great tragedies in life, not getting what you want, and getting it.’ O. Wilde.

To get all you want is to live in fear; that you’ll lose it, that it will be stolen, that the Universe will ask you, ‘now what?’ The King lives in fear in a way the Chief does not. This fear is bound to then course through the people. The divine right of succession is a double edged sword. It makes leadership way more precarious. The rule of succession is also a hit list. You cannot help but become hyper-vigilant, paranoid and super aggressive. Assassins could be anywhere. The smallest deviation of protocol must be punished. All must bow and show show the backs of their necks.

In recent history you could be publicly executed for being in the company of Gypsies for more than a month, impersonating a Chelsea pensioner, or even being ‘a malicious child’. To stay in power others must be cut down for the slightest infringement. The king’s fear then becomes your fear. What we think of as the aggressive patriarchal attitude is rooted in fear. The King does not merely stuff down and distract himself from his fear, he has to forcibly put it into the Cook and then hunt him down.

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Machiavelli

Kingship comes with a kitbag of troubles for King and Cook alike. The King gets to be the target of every envious eye whilst feeling empty and curiously unfed despite all the delicacies bought to his table. This dissatisfaction with pleasures previously imagined to be the hieght of aspiration is going to lead quickly to existential crisis and the kind of lashing out that goes with feeling cheated. I have everything, why am I so lonely and unfulfilled?

The King’s subjects then have to reckon with a bad-tempered and sulky leader, prone to temper tantrums and decisions everyone might regret in the morning. People are like bees, placid for as long as the leader is in a good mood and emitting the right pheromones. If we get collectively belligerent its on account of what the leader is putting out or failing to. The assault on the US Capitol and recent events in South Africa show quite clearly how collective aggression is amplified and spun out of control by the mood swings of a single reified person.

Psychologically, the King and the Cook seem to represent that crisis in any journey of self discovery where the habituated and dominant mind set/identity has run its course and yet still needs some kind of elusive transformation. You have attained your goal but somehow can suck no more marrow from it. Life has gotten easy and taken for granted. Success makes you arrogant yet whole other aspects of life are being left untended and unsavored.

Meantime the creative capacity to bring meaning and satisfaction, is relentlessly persecuted and has to play dead to try and save itself. Much of life’s suffering comes from having to suppress oneself, emergent qualities and attributes have to be deadened in order to maintain a stable self-structure.

In our story the situation is redeemed entirely by accident/grace. The bread which the Cook had bought for himself slips between his fingers in the process of playing dead, falling to the ground at the King’s feet, like manna from Heaven, with enlightening consequences. The King rediscovers his ordinariness in the sweat, grime and hunger of his adventure into the Unconscious. The Cook is saved by luck, or is there some divine intervention?

Either way the situation is healed by something other than heroic effort. In fact the poor Cook is just trying to save his skin. Rather, a synchronous event takes place which then constitutes a non-rational solution to the problem of the overweening personality. The moment of transformation, the sense of a spell being lifted, happens by itself, Deo Concedente, once both Cook and King have exhausted their respective prerogatives, one to flee in self preservation, the other to tyrannically persecute. It’s as though things have to come to a head between conflicting instincts to both preserve and create for the ‘accident’ to take place, involving a brush with death of some kind..

A great deal gets written about how we heal and grow. The beauty of our story is that it seems to condense it all down into such wonderfully simple principles. It happens in its own time in its own way, sometimes in the midst of crisis, yet without forcing and seemingly by chance, unexpectedly nourishing in its profound ordinariness.

In the Godfather part III, there is an assassination by helicopter gunship scene, perfectly ambushing the gang members in what they perceive to be their eagle’s nest. One of the horrified mobsters runs for his jacket as the machine gun fire pours in, screaming, ‘my lucky coat, my lucky coat!’ Eventually he reaches the precious coat and grasps it to him, just as he is unfairly cut to pieces. Who knows what might have been possible if he’d a few more seconds…

The pathos is that this tough mobster is not simply trying to save his coat but that in his clinging to it there is the hope that it will save him. At the moment of truth a primitive underlying fantasy of omnipotent fusion with a totemic object, something that really is of the Underworld, bursts through the prosaic dog eat dog world of organised crime.

Mobsters and ‘isms’ of all kinds have never been all that good at acknowledging the Other and so relatedness is bound to assume some curious forms. The difference between the ‘primitive’ with his totem and the neurotic with his compulsion is that the primitive understands he’s in the grip of something whereas the modern does not and is therefor more likely to wind up dead because of it.

Sometimes this problem can be cleared up by getting the magical jacket or at least it’s sleeves tattooed onto your body for safe keeping, relieving the anxiety of having it nicked or being caught short in a shoot out.

In Gogol’s, ‘The Overcoat,’ the protagonist suffers the ignominy and horror of having his lucky jacket torn from his back by shadowy muggers. Even though he attained this ermined badge of office and all the esteem due to him, he could not secure it. Whether he has the overcoat or not his value is still outside him. To achieve it is to be enslaved by it; to lose it, cast down.

This powerlessness which ever way you turn is the crux of any unconscious complex. It feels like a lose/lose situation. Even when you have the jacket it is spoilt by the having to have it… and not having it is just like being robbed.

In the course of my analysis with Chuck Schwartz I once dreamed that he came over to me with his hand out, saying very seriously, ‘give me the jacket’. I looked down and saw I was wearing a matador’s jacket with gold thread in the stitching. I refused, suddenly fearful. He insisted and eventually I began to peel it off. It really was like having to flay myself alive, a horrible torment but afterwards such blessed relief.

What I learned is that analysis is much more than reacquainting yourself with trauma and suppressed memory, nor even becoming aware of deeper layers of the Psyche. It is also a question of what we are unconsciously identified with whilst sifting through all this content. The beginner’s mistake in self-knowledge is to assume you have no prior epistemology. What coat, whose coat, are you wearing at the time? Which of the gods has your allegiance and therefor influence over your perception?

In Grimm’s ‘Bearskin’, the protagonist is given a lucky jacket by the Devil, with pockets eternally full of gold. Over this and concealing it is thrown a great Bearskin. The idea is that if he can survive having everything he ever wanted for seven years the Devil would then…give him everything he ever wanted.

Well, gold every time you put your hands in your pockets seems brilliant until you want a hanky or a sandwich. Moreover, the growing stink of the Bearskin meant that people didn’t want to hang out with him no mo’. He learns that gold, like sex, isn’t all that much fun unless its a shared experience.

At first the gold producing jacket is enchanting and the bearskin a mere encumbrance. After a few years, once no-one comes near, the magical jacket falls into disuse. His comfort devolves into the bearskin instead, which gives him protection from the elements and into whose folds he could retreat and reflect on stuff.

It turns out that ‘everything you ever wanted’ is a miserable curse only to be lifted when its used to give rather than to get. Not only does money not buy you love, it can actively get in the way. In another story by Gogol, ‘the Fair at Sorockyntsi’, an infamous devil was booted out of hell for being too extreme. His next heinous plan is then to allow his jacket to fall into the hands of human kind. A trail of destruction follows anyone tempted to wear it. Eventually a trader realises that he cannot sell his wares because of it and chops the jacket to pieces with an axe.

Magical things are necessary to development. It’s the beginning of getting used to the idea that the breast has its own life. Yet to identify with them unreservedly, failing to outlive them, is to adopt a stance unconsciously taken, to pay a price for a deal you can’t quite recall making..

So the main thing is not what you might know but the ‘vested’ interest you already use to constrain response. To address an issue is to become aware of what you are dressed for, in what capacity you speak and on whose team you are batting. Chuck’s response to my dream of him demanding my matador’s jacket was, ‘we are possessed by anything we are unconsciously identified with.’

Wouldn’t it be interesting to close your eyes for a second and, in your mind’s eye, to get a glimpse of the imaginal jacket you are wearing,…? What does it say about your relationship with the world? What magical expectation does it give rise to?

Once upon a time there lived an ancient ruler, the Red King, who presided over a land in sad decline. The king himself was miserable all day long. Despite his wealth and power he could not enjoy it. The most exotic foods tasted bland. His courtiers had forgotten whether he was short or tall. Eventually his son the Prince went to him, asking the matter. The king dolefully explained that his great friend, the White King, was trapped in the Golden Forest. He was held prisoner by a Wicked Witch who daily sent droves of her minions to the Silken Meadow where his tent was pitched at the very heart of the Forest, making it impossible for him to leave.

The Prince bravely offers to try and free the White King. Before he departs his father tells him to take the old six legged nag lying in the mud behind the stables and feed it live coals from the fire which make it strong and youthful. Next he gives him a rusty old sword that looks perfectly useless but has its own life and fights enemies twelve at at time.

The Prince saddles up and flies directly to the Golden Forest, eventually arriving at the Silken Meadow. At the centre of the meadow, the royal tent. The Prince calls out but there is no reply. He goes in and finds the Red King asleep on a golden bed. In a corner a young Princess also lies sleeping. The Prince himself settles down for a nap.

‘The hero of the fairytale is profoundly unconscious of himself. He is one of the “sleepers,” the unawakened .” Jung CW13.

On waking he introduces himself to the Red King and his daughter who explain that at sunrise the Witch’s minions will magically emerge from the mountain where she lives. Between the White King and the Red Prince, or at least by virtue of their enchanted swords, a path is carved through the enemies to the cave where the terrible crone sits at a mighty loom, weaving armed minions by the dozen at every cycle of the loom.

The Prince runs her through with his dagger and the curse is lifted.

Long ago, beyond the reach of folk with excessively glamorous hats, come stories that seem to point to something of our original condition before Church and State got too close a hold on it. Forbidden wisdoms retreated into the relative safety of allegory, waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes this was quite literally true, like the buried Gnostic scrolls found at Nag Hammadi. Sometimes it is the treasure of being able to glean some meaning from a seemingly insignificant story which nevertheless represents some collective experience sufficiently potent to endure in oral tradition for thousands of years.

At the time Christianity was eradicating the Old Ways, stories sprung up which told some aspect of the situation. It was a time when Gods were being banished, when our connection to Nature got lost. From behind the protection of city walls the world beyond suddenly began to feel ‘Other’. The birth of consciousness as we know it begins at the edges of territory, a firm boundary but also separation and loss.

Our story begins with the old Red King in a terrible state about the loss of his dear friend the White King, who has been trapped in the Silken Meadow at the heart of the Great Forest by the Wicked Witch.

‘The forest, dark and impenetrable to the eye, like deep water and the sea, is the container of the unknown and the mysterious. It is an appropriate synonym for the unconscious. Among the many trees… the living contents of the unconscious.’ Jung CW13

Our story seems to begin by saying that something has happened in the collective psyche such that the White King, a figure synonymous with the alchemical Mercurius, a divine spirit predating the subsequent sharp distinction between good and evil, has been swallowed up by the Unconscious. This is a very great loss to the ego which depends upon the mercurial spirit to replenish it and without which there is bound to be a crisis of meaning, symbolised by the despairing Red King, whose purpose is forfeit, whose lands wither and die, in response to the White King’s entrapment.

These two kings seem to typify what Jung called, on the one hand, the rationalistic component of the psyche, ‘Spirit of this Time,” and on the other a transcendent, primordial “Spirit of the Depths,” The Spirit of this Time represents humanity’s current perceptions and wisdom, insisting on orderly dogmas which try to divide supreme meaning into two halves: one, a God-image of accepted moral right and order, the other, a rejected devilish shadow of evil and chaos. The Spirit of the Depths, meanwhile, insists that the true Godhead is not this God-image, but is instead the sum of both the image and its shadow. 

Our story has a counter narrative to the idea that we are created In God’s image. It rather suggests it is we who have made God in ours. In the attempt to have God as an object of consciousness we separate ourselves from the totality of the Spirit of the Depths. He then gets held captive in the Great Forest.

The Red King cannot save the situation himself. It is not within the ego’s power to intervene directly. Another principle must be bought into play and it’s not what you’d think. Rather than great bravery or cunning, the situation rests in the hands of a naive and unworldly prince, a Parsifal figure whose strength is in that he knows he is a beginner. He is under no pretensions as to his experience for he has none. What he does do very well is listen and receptively take advice. He follows the non-rational suggestion to feed coals to the Old Nag in the mud, a way of being emotionally involved with whatever it is in us we regard is dirty or inferior.

Such internal cohesion is more important from any repertoire of former heroic deeds, no matter how many dragons slain you have on your cv. You have to find the value in the rusty sword which then works on your behalf and through which the transcendent function begins to express itself via the symbolism of magical property. The sword fights autonomously, the transformed nag has six legs and can fly.

Humbly accepting help where it’s needed, even if it’s from unlikely sources, is what smooths the Prince’s path to the Silken Meadow. ‘To those who have the symbol’, say the alchemists, ‘the passage is easy’, though when he arrives his unpreparedness manifests as a form of sleeping on the job and so it is up to the White King to initiate discussion once the Prince wakes up. Both of them have been armed in the sleeping presence of the other, cause for trust. So they are then able to work together to defeat the Wicked Witch’s minions.

This co-operation between the White King and the Red Prince is crucial to psychological healing and spiritual growth. Often it is not just what you have endured but internal division in the face of it which makes it so intolerable. The idea that you can’t change the past forgets it’s how we hold it that’s important. The Prince is able to face down the Witch because he has access to resources and internal cohesion he didn’t have before, not because his history suddenly changed.

Analyst Donald Kalsched talks about ‘self care systems’, where the psyche’s defences against further trauma effectively seal the self off from the world in a way that protects but also limits and restricts like the witch in Rapunzel who imprisons the Princess ‘for her own good’. I wonder if something similar did not happen culturally when we lost the Great Mother, a collective trauma prompting a mass self care encapsulation symbolised by the Witch who lives in the mountain, the rejected Divine Feminine in her wrathful, destructive aspect, devouring and imprisoning life rather than creating it, in vengeful response to being so rudely deposed by the new religion.

This Stone Witch can only be defeated under specific circumstances. Firstly, the Prince’s naivety seems to work for him rather than against him. He typifies what we could call ‘beginner’s mind’, keeping it fixed in awareness that you know next to nothing, don’t have the facts and are largely dependant on others for help. This prevents him from getting inflated which is a tricky piece of navigating when you have a flying horse. Accumulation and amassing stuff is so second nature to us we forget that the central task in life is a form of remembering who you are behind all such clutter, especially the virtuous ones.

Secondly, the Prince is not in this for gain. He involves himself on behalf of another which depotentates the witchy complex of unrelatedness, giving rise to the possibility of a redeeming, creative feminine perhaps best expressed in the unexpected/synchronous appearance of the Princess. It is his relatedness which saves the day.

There is so much talk about ‘working on yourself’ in psychology we forget that what this largely constitutes is a matter of how we interact with others, what kinds of conversations are possible, whether you can be another’s equal.

If we are to collectively liberate the White King, a principle which reflects all the different colours of the spectrum; if we are to effectively address the divisiveness that leads to ecological disaster and human conflict, then it needs to be done by way of working on behalf of the Other, with the paradoxical humility that we ourselves need help to do so.

From the fringes of the Ottoman Empire comes a story about a foolish farmer who was trying to catch a horse in a field and stumbled across a very large and unusual pumpkin. The pumpkin so perplexed the farmer he forgot about the horse. What could it be? He touched it, then he smelled it. Something had to be done. So he took it to the village council for their wise deliberation.

The Mayor, who was a very clever fellow, noticed that it looked like an egg and so therefor that is what it must be. The farmer confirmed it was warm when he found it so it had to be an egg. But what kind of egg? Might it be a dragon egg that once it hatched burn them all down? The farmer then had the wonderful idea that since he had been chasing a horse at the time it must be a horse egg. The council liked this idea and decided the egg should be hatched. Since most horses don’t lay eggs they had a difficult time finding a mare to oblige them eventually deciding that if the local horses were too stupid to hatch an egg they would have to sit on it themselves. Which is what they did, taking it in turns to keep the egg warm.

In the next village the rumor began that the egg had gone bad despite the ministration of the council men’s bottoms. Divisions then emerged amongst the council’s own ranks as to whether the egg should continue to be warmed or whether it had indeed gone bad and should be thrown away. Eventually they reached the compromise of rolling it down the hill onto the village which had teased them and everyone gathered for the show. The egg was rolled but it went into some bushes startling a rabbit which shot out in fright. ‘There goes the horse’, they cried, giving chase. Only the mayor remained at the top of the hill shaking his head. ‘if only they had listened and warmed the egg one more day.’

It’s fun to laugh at the collective foolishness of the villagers forgetting that the story is about ourselves. It holds up a mirror to our own situations. We too tend to operate as though there were nothing outside our own frame of reference with the attitude that the world is whatever I know of it. People are always right and when something comes along to defy our god almightiness we’d rather double down than change our cherished points of view. These are sometimes so rigidly held as to constitute a nucleus of identity which is then defended with all the zeal of self preservation, despite evidence to the contrary.

Likewise, our theories of knowledge are not developed ‘by accumulation’, but tend to be episodic with long periods of accepted facts and theories interrupted by shorter periods of revolutionary change where not only the facts change but so too the paradigms with which we hold them. [Kuhn]. A change in the paradigm is caused by anomalies which the old belief system can’t explain. As these mount up the existing structure comes increasingly under strain; the crisis in the church caused by the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, the blow to scientific materialism caused by Hiesenberg’s uncertainty principle which says that ‘matter’ defies our ability to describe what it is doing in time and space, further complicated by the concept of quantum superpositions which don’t seem to have a presence in three dimensions at all.

Individually, we experience these seismic tremors of paradigm change as the discovery that Mum is a person, encountering other babies, being left with a sitter, kindergarten, boys and girls, sex and competition, leaving home, having your own kids. Every day is the same until the anomaly hoves into view and suddenly the axis of life is shifted forever into a new configuration beset with perplexity.

For this reason we are bound to resist what is new and unknown. New things have a way of turning our cozy old things on their head, destroying yesterday’s truths rather than augmenting them. The new thing might add to our store of things or it might burn it down. This makes even what we hope for something of a threat. Be careful what you ask for, as the old adage goes. Perhaps such understanding might help us be a bit more compassionate towards our own folly and the seeming pig headedness of others.

As often as we cross new thresholds, new ways of seeing the world as well as all the things in it, so too must we weather the inevitably gauche, ambivalent and clumsy efforts involved. Provable things can still be subject to denial and disbelief which is why asking a neurotic to be reasonable so enflames them. To be sensible attacks his article of faith.

‘The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.’ [Kuhn]

It helps to have a sense of humour, to be able to laugh at oneself, to see both the necessity and the pathos of resistant squirming. Without some sense of tolerable embarrassment for former misconceptions, without letting yourself not know stuff, humbly conceiving the possibility of something beyond your ken, then the new thing has to be subjected to splitting and projection instead, onto the neighbouring villagers who can tell there’s a stink in all our self conviction.

Meantime, the pumpkin goes to waste and drops back into the unconscious. Before long history will recall that this is because it was forbidden fruit.

In old Japan there once lived a poor man and his wife. They had no children and so they gave all the love they had to their dog, ‘Shiro,’ which means ‘white’ because he was white from nose to tail. They fed him the best of scraps and played with him in the evening after dinner.

One day Shiro was digging beneath a tree at the bottom of the garden, barking like mad. The old man went to see and to his amazement found that Shiro had dug up a great treasure of gold coins. His envious neighbour had meanwhile observed everything. Next day he asked the old man if he might borrow the dog. He set Shiro loose in his own garden to see where he might dig. He was rough and insistent, pressing Shiro to find something for him and so the dog began to dig anxiously wherever he might.

The neighbour got angrier and angrier as Shiro turned up nothing but rocks. Eventually he swung a blow at him with a shovel, killing the poor dog. He threw Shiro in the hole he’d so faithfully dug and buried him under the stones.

The old man and his wife were devastated when they heard what had happened. They arrived at their neighbour’s door weeping, and begged him most politely if they might have the tree beneath which Shiro was buried to remember him by. The horrible neighbor could scarcely disagree and so the old man cut down the tree and took it home. He lovingly carved a bowl from it and gave it to his wife who used it that evening to pound rice. To her amazement the rice began to multiply as she pounded it and some invisible hand began to make the most delicious cakes right before her eyes.

Of course the horrible neighbour got to hear about this and stole the bowl which would also not work for him and so he broke it up and burned it on the fire. Once again the old man and his wife knocked on the door crying and asked very politely for the ashes of the fire to continue remembering Shiro.

Some months later when winter had come and snow lay on the ground, the kind old man and his wife decided to scatter Shiro’s ashes in the garden they had all loved together and as they did so the bare trees suddenly burst into blossom; pear, plum and cherry all flowered into life with every sprinkle.

The local nobleman heard of the miraculous ashes and called the old man and his wife to see if they might help with the recent death of his favorite tree. They went along and sure enough a single sprinkle bought the tree to life. The noblemen was overjoyed and gave them a big bag of gold.

Meantime the wicked neighbour heard all about this and gathered the remaining ashes from the fireplace, resolving that he too would learn to sprinkle ashes. He swaggered off to the nobleman’s house to get some gold for himself, though the ashes just blew in everyone’s eyes and he got thrown into a dungeon for his trouble.

On the face of it this story is a simple parable about good being rewarded and evil getting its just desserts but it seems to have a deeper running theme to do with the relationship between life and death, between heartfelt grief and ecstatic celebration.

We tend to have the attitude towards grief and loss that ‘this too shall pass’. We forget that grief is about love and value and is therefor connected to the sacred which, once remembered, then pours itself into experience as divine generosity or the grace of god. Grief therefor has a synthetic effect, it catalyses the re-integration of consciousness at a new level of development. Grief is not only necessary to love but meaning and abundance are restored on account of it. Remembering Shiro animates the bowl, transforming it into a cornucopia of nourishing plenty. Likewise the cherished ashes quicken dead wood, imbuing the trees with spirit ex nihilo.

If our pain is the breaking shell that encloses our understanding [Gibran] then we must experience many such events in life. Growth is never incremental. It rather proceeds by fits and starts, by paradigm shifts which involve disorienting loss in a way that reliably unfolding days do not, the end of a relationship, random events which end a stage of life, dark thresholds which tease apart as much as configure anew.

This wrench from attachment loosens internal cohesion as well as outer ties. It produces a state akin to dissociation, but since grief’s origin is Eros and relatedness it doesn’t stop there. Something autonomous responds from the Unseen, transfiguring Death such that it is also the birth of the new, a doorway to the as yet Unimagined.

In Egyptian mythology we find this emphasized in the story of Osiris’ death at the hands of his horrible neighbour and brother, Set who chops him up into bits. The pieces are gathered up by dog headed god of grief and death Anubis who reassembles all the pieces before ushering Osiris into the next world for subsequent adventures. Such reintegration is not achieved by heroic action but by allowing oneself to be acted upon by the feelings, rituals and obligations engendered by relatedness. The old man and his wife do not act against the horrible neighbour, that would be to become like him. Rather they allow themselves to mourn Shiro to the full, their love ultimately evoking something miraculous and transformational.

Once there were two brothers, both dirt poor and with more kids than they could feed. One of the brothers went into the forest to gather nuts he might sell at market. The other collected poppy seeds with the same idea. On the way to market they met and agreed to exchange sacks, though each cheated the other. The one substituted ashes for the poppy seeds and the second handed over half a sack of oak apples instead of nuts. When they got back to their respective homes the two brothers are furious to find out what the other has done. They stomp off to confront the other armed with pointy sticks with which they then beat one another mercilessly.

The brothers then go to a rich man’s house seeking employment. After just three days of work the rich man gives them each a plate full of gold which he draws out of a deep well. Overjoyed, they are about to head home when the one says to the other, ‘why don’t we come back at night and steal the rest?’ which seemed to be a great wheeze. So they crept back once it was dark and the one lowered the other down, though when he was down he wondered how he might get out since his brother would surely leave him there and take off with the gold, so he put himself in the sack as well.

The weight of the sack is so great that the one carrying it has to rest before long and while he rests the other climbs out and runs off with the gold. They steal it from one another like this all the way home.

The brothers think of themselves as very different from one another. The fact that they are like peas in a pod is obscured by all the dust raised in their scuffle. Likewise the argument between extreme elements of the left and the right around the world seem to want the same thing, the wish not to have to play by the rules whilst being furious with the other guy for wishing the same thing. Irrespective of their political inclinations, parties of every hue somehow manage to produce the same monochromatic tyrants.

Russian socialism produced Stalin. Chinese communism spawned Mao. The French revolution produced Napoleon. The Zimbabwean liberation struggle birthed Mugabe, Philippine democracy elected Duterte, a broad swathe of the political spectrum yet each one first and foremost an autocrat. How does it happen? Why do the people support those whose prime directive is to crush them? Something is operating besides political affiliation. What could it be?

It seems that despite our collective yearning for equality and the rule of law there remains an unacknowledged collective need to have our leaders be beyond accountability, that might have right, even if its our own necks the jackboot finally comes down upon.

Until such a time as these things can be contemplated the Nixons and the Trumps will get away with behavior that would land you or I in jail. We won’t really understand why, other than to reassert the hackneyed corruption of a few senate enablers, carefully leaving the rest of us all out of the equation.

The underlying issue, a collective and regressive desire to be told what to do, gets no airtime at all, an easy omission to make given that it is dressed up as its opposite, the radical self determination of, ‘don’t tread on me’.

Western democracy is developmentally about twelve. When Ghandi was asked what he thought of western democracy he said, ‘it would be a good idea’. We really aren’t there yet. We’re still steeped in pubescent angst, in the need for parental boundaries/instruction, urgently identifying with father figures whose power is then our power, most necessary to offset the rank insecurity of not knowing who you are or what is going on which goes with being twelve.

And yet… the argument for Trump simply being the logical outcome of narcissistic culture and reality game show mentality defending wish fulfillment as entitled birthright… seems insufficient.

Why?

Because the secret weapon of the autocrat is that he is the people’s hotline to god. The king is always divinely appointed. If anyone steals the crown then they are king and that is also divinely appointed. The theft of the rich man’s gold is about the exclusive and autocratic arrogation of divine power to oneself. The mob allows for individual concerns and insecurities to melt away, certainly, but that is not all. The glorious leader is identical with god. If we are identical with him and doing his bidding that means we are also god… or at least his right hand.

And so the hollow pit is both stilled by the sweaty warmth of collective identity and then topped up with Divine Intervention and Old Testament Brimstone. Caught on camera at the Capitol, ‘kill the infidels!’ This is not about politics or due process. It’s about where, how and with whom you pray.

The brothers begin with splitting and projection in order to live with themselves but it doesn’t end there. The inner gap created by the casting of One’s demons on the Other is then filled up with the ill-gotten gains of the gold bearing well, a quintessential image of the divine feminine which the brothers jointly plunder, causing them to entirely lose their moral compass.

In the end the brothers decide that since they were both cheats they should be friends and divvy the loot, forgetting it was for the same reason they were so recently at war. Needing to make sense has been superseded by convenience, the idea of being above the law and getting away with the stolen gold. It’s as though some wise soul at the dawn of the male sky god era saw the danger and crafted a tale to warn of what might come.

Once upon a time there was a childless couple. Their sadness was so great that eventually the man went off to carve a stump he found in the forest until it resembled a boy and took it home to his wife. That night while they slept the wooden boy came to life and woke them up. They were amazed and admired him till morning.

After breakfast Wooden Peter asked his father for eight florins to buy a sword, the first the local blacksmith had ever made. After much searching the blacksmith bought out a small rusty sword and strapped it to Peter’s belt where it suddenly gleamed with new life. In the village square a crowd had gathered around two magnificent Oxen held together with a golden chain. Whoever could break the chain could have the Oxen. Many had tried and failed but Wooden Peter was undaunted and cut the chain in two.

Wooden Peter took the Oxen home with instructions to feed them live coals when he arrived.. He built a great fire and fed the coals to the Oxen which then flew off to the points of sunset and sunrise respectively, without so much as a by your leave.

Wooden Peter then summoned his father and showed him something amazing, that by touching the gate posts he could cause the one to produce wine and the other, brandy. Wooden Peter then announced his wish to go out into the world, saying,

‘When the mill stone in the yard leaps into the barrow of its own accord, the wine turns to water and the brandy to blood you will know I have died. Then climb in the barrow which will bring you to me.’

Wooden Peter then set off on his adventures, arriving eventually at a great castle where the king was preparing for war. Peter volunteered his services and dealt with the enemy single handed until he stumbled and was killed.

The millstone back home jumped into the barrow of its own accord. The Wine turned to water and the brandy to blood. The old man got in the barrow as he had been told which took him to the spot where Peter had fallen but he was not to be seen. Then the two Oxen arrived, one from the direction of sunset, the other from sun rise and dug up the broken body of Peter from where it had been buried.. The one re-membered his body, the other replaced his soul and soon Peter was restored.

Our story begins with a barren situation, the childless couple. The Psyche is stagnant, there’s nothing going on. Sharing in the collective identity predominant in pre-neolithic culture, being a chip off the old block is no longer enough. The concept of personal destiny begins to emerge from the millennial dominance of clan imperative, demanding both a new relationship with the world and a new relationship with tribe.

Stories are a bit like teddy bears, both me and not-me. They bridge separation and show us how separation might be managed. Finding a distinct sense of self involves much loss and parring away which re-configures how we imagine meaning might be found and where we imagine redemption may lie.

As primordial Parsifal, Wooden Peter sets out on his heroic quest of self discovery. He begins at the Blacksmith shop where he asks for the oldest, rustiest sword. What is the significance of that? Why does it have the power to cut the chain binding the sacred oxen?

The difficulty for emerging ego is the issue of the shadow, it must find a way of incorporating inferior aspects of the personality in order to make wholeness out of heroic self idealization. The sword is ‘inferior’, the inexperienced first effort of youth, which, consciously wielded, is also ‘beginner’s mind’, the zen-like stillness of not knowing which such adventures often require.

The personality still in touch with it’s own limitations, though by association also awe and wonder, is what’s required to free the sacred Oxen so that they can come into a more purposive relationship with emerging ego which has to feed them with living heat, intense and passionate involvement.

Originally, according to Chinese myth, plow-oxen lived in Heaven, as the Ox constellation. The Emperor of Heaven, wishing to help humanity, sent the Oxen down to Earth with the message that if they worked hard, they could be sure to have a meal at least every three days. The Oxen got the message mixed-up, and instead told the people that the Emperor of Heaven promised them they would be able to eat three times a day.

This put the Emperor of Heaven in a bit of a pickle, since the people on their own would not be able to accomplish such a thing. Being as much poet as administrator, he saw a way to fulfill this great boast by having the Oxen remain on Earth. With their help the mighty feat of eating three times a day could then be achieved.^[To the ancient psyche, Oxen were the message and manifestation of divine providence.

Wooden Peter has to develop a relationship with the something he is emerging from, because that something might easily swallow him back up. To prevent this and to free the oxen to their more constructive purpose, they must be approached with a symbol of everything which is unpretentious, simple, without agenda. Then, enormous amounts of energy must be invested in them.

Once this is done, rather than being depleted, Wooden Peter seems to be imbued with miraculous powers. Getting in alignment with that which transcends him ensures a kind of cosmic co-operation whose effect is magical. In our own lives this might manifest as synchronicity or as events which seem to line up, not by direct influence but by a tending of their fundamental roots. The ancient Chinese call it Wu Wei, effortless action.

‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.” C.G. Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man.

Wooden Peter is not redeemed by his own actions. Even though he achieved great things, these alone lead ultimately to the limits of heroic action, the death of an ideal Siegfried. It is the Oxen, with whom he developed right relationship, which come and save the day. This rather invites us to reconsider what we mean when we talk about ‘working on myself’, or, more crudely, ‘fixing myself’. It seems all noble and well intentioned but it assumes the ego is the agent of change which might well be a large part of the problem to begin with. Many modern afflictions have ancient roots, we confuse ourselves with the gods and then, having skipped over self-discovery, suffer the inflation of ‘self-improvement’.

Our story suggests that what is meaningful and redemptive is no amount of great deeds, but whether or not you can be emotionally invested in the Other. For this it is necessary to develop a certain ambivalence to one’s own destiny. It’s no longer about meeting my goals or loving myself or thinking positively, because the point of reference is still stuck at me, myself, I.

Quick fix therapies, particularly those which offer you control over your thoughts and feelings are fostering narcissism. Fortunately they tend to be short in duration, the patient becomes so inflated they don’t need help any more. Unfortunately, they are also short on efficacy. Within no time at all the band aid comes loose and the wound of personal goals triumphing over meaningful participation begins to bleed again.

In Olden Times, when wishing still helped .. there lived a King with a radiant daughter. Their castle lay hard by a great Forest, within which there was a cool well. On a warm summer’s day the Princess would go and play by the well with her golden ball, a favorite plaything. One day the ball fell in the water and was suddenly swallowed up. She sat there crying when up popped a massive, bloated Frog..

‘Do not weep… I can help you, but what will you give me?’

‘Whatever you please, my pearls and jewels, even my crown…’

‘Er, actually, what I really want is just that you love me.. and be my companion.. and play-fellow.. and sit by you at table.. and eat from your plate.. and drink from your cup.. and sleep in your bed…..and..’

The Princess agrees without thinking too much past the ease with which she has already resolved to duck out of their arrangement. Frog retrieves the golden ball and with scarcely a thought the Princess runs off, leaving him behind. Later that evening at dinner and having quite forgotten the incident there comes a great banging at the castle gate..

‘Princess, open the door, I come to claim on your promise.’

The Princess is freaked out and explains what has happened to her father …’ and now he is outside there, and wants to come into me…’

The King insists she keep her word and Frog is let in. He heaves himself up onto the table and begins to feast from the Princess’ golden plate, slurping from her silver cup until he is quite bloated. ‘Now take me to your bed, where we will lie down together…’

The Princess was horrified but the King insists, so she took him in two fingers and put him in a corner of her bedroom.

‘No, no, in bed with you.’

At which point something splintered and broke in the Princess. She picked up the Frog and threw him against the wall with all her might. A scream of rage and a sickening splat. ‘Now, will you be quiet, odious Frog…’

Suddenly, in place of Frog stood a handsome Prince who explained that a wicked witch had cast a spell on him but that he had been redeemed by the Princess’ actions. Next day a carriage arrives to carry them off to his kingdom together. The coach is driven by Iron Henry, the Prince’s faithful companion who had placed iron bands around his heart in lament at the cursing of the Prince. Now they break free one after the other with such a cracking as to think the carriage had broken, so great was his happiness.

Our story begins ‘when wishing still helped’, when ego development is still so nascent that fantasy and reality are still all mashed up, when inner and outer events can still happily trade places.

The Golden Ball reminds us of that unity of personality we had as children, before we split into male and female, rich and poor, good and bad.’ R Bly

When the golden ball is lost undifferentiated oneness has reached its sell by date. Blissful as ignorance may be it has to be lost and when something finally does come along which is decidedly Other, it can come as a shock. The Princess first encounter with Not-Me is in the form of this primal, cold blooded demon lover whose demands feel humiliating and intrusive. The ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche by something which seems as hideous as it is autonomous.

Frog represents the dangerous, engulfing, devouring aspect of the unconscious. He is reminiscent of the Medieval ‘Incubus’ a demon spirit which sexually possesses while you sleep, a graphic representation of being helpless and overwhelmed by unrelatable forces.

There’s something inevitable about this. The constellation of ‘me’ depends upon an emerging sense of ‘not-me’, that which we differentiate from. This is bound to involve a sense of disgust and revulsion; or perhaps as incomprehensible intrusion so brilliantly portrayed at the opening of the movie, ‘The Hobbit’ when all the Dwarfs come crashing through Bilbo’s door and suddenly life is utterly disrupted.

The Princess feels persecuted by developments, not least of all because her father rigidly insists on her keeping her word despite, like Eve before her, being quite unable to grasp the true consequences of her actions. Perhaps her mother is absent because she too got gobbled up or cast in the sea with millstones around her neck. Whatever the truth, Princess has no advocate in her father who simply intones the word of the law in an unrelated kind of way and fails to mediate or plead with Frog. He’s uninvolved and so Princess is thrown back on her own resources like Gretel in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ who has to circumvent her adaptive ‘good girl’ identity by pushing the engulfing witch into the oven.

Sometimes Frog has to be kissed, sometimes he has to be squashed. Perhaps the important thing is that Princess is emotionally involved in some kind of visceral way. Both the kissing and the splatting of Frog entail breaking a taboo, operating outside the rule book, being the author of independent action, being visible with her instincts.

Hate makes sure we do not abdicate our own point of view. If an encounter with the unconscious is to serve the ego then it must not be by way of the latter’s blind adherence. Psychiatrist and analyst Roberto Assagioli says of the crisis caused by spiritual awakening,

‘no validity should be attributed to messages [from the unconscious] containing definite orders and commanding blind obedience’.

The Princess must use her own instinctive discrimination in the face of overwhelming threat for the transformation of the indiscriminate Frog to take place, for him to become humanized and useful.

‘The first ego organization comes from the experience of threats of annihilation which do not lead to annihilation and from which, repeatedly, there is recovery.”
D. Winnicott.

If hatred is love grown angry then any philosophy of life prejudicial to hate, or that regards it as ‘negative’ is also against love’s frustrated yearning. To silence hate is to quash the hope that love might be forthcoming. The Princess’ actions are in expectation of a fairer deal, an expression of the desire to be loved that does not involve her extinction.

‘Hatred, I consider, is just a standing reproach to the hated
person, and owes all its meaning to a demand for love. Ian Suttie

In order to make such a demand you have to feel worthy of it. The splatting of Frog is angry insistence on her own loveableness which refuses utter subjugation, reserves the right to self determination… and therefor transforms the situation.

This flowering of the feminine ego releases the masculine principle from its less differentiated and purely instinctive iteration into something more relatable and resourceful. The psyche itself evolves in response to the ego daring to be itself, warts and all.

Being good does not bring about transformation. The emphasis on following the rules makes an empty vessel of us in which the golden ball will roll around interminably.

‘There are two tragedies in life, not getting what you want and getting it.’ Oscar Wilde.

So there’s something just as bad as the encounter with Frog and that is never to meet him at all, never to find the transformative value of ‘Yuk!’ or shed the restriction of being bound by kingly approval. The impact of this on the psyche at large is emphasized by the curious detail at the end of the story of Iron Henry, the faithful servant of Frog and mediator between worlds, a Hermes, whose joy at Princess discovering herself and transforming his master is celebrated by spontaneously breaking the constrictions around his heart.

‘The Giant Tree’ is a Hungarian precursor to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. According to the Aarne-Thomson-Uther classification of fairy tales this makes it one of the Indo-European proto-stories, a story which would have been established in the oral tradition at the dawn of kingship, tens of thousands of years ago.

This older story gives us a closer look into the collective situation with it’s greater and nuanced detail. It is a story stood on the threshold of a whole new social structure, City states and their semi-divine kings, alongside the further emergence of ego consciousness, all at a time when the multiple Old Gods of Earth and Wood were being driven out by equally unhinged variants of the stand alone Sky God. If you are going to invent kingship you need a warlike god to back you up. And he would have to be the only one for the king to justify why he is the only one…

I digress.

Once upon a time, many many years ago there lived a king with his daughter. In their garden there was a Mighty Tree which reached all the way up to the Heavens. One day when the Princess was out walking a Great Wind blew up and carried her to the very top.

The King offered half his kingdom to any brave hero who could fetch her down. Many tried and failed. Some broke their legs, some their necks. Out in the forest there lived a swineherd called Jack. One day one of his pigs said to him, ‘you should go and save the Princess.’

‘but I don’t know how..’ said Jack.

So the Pig whispered in his ear and next day Jack presented himself at Court. The King was unimpressed at this lowly man but Jack persuaded him that if only he would kill a Buffalo and make seven coats and seven pairs of boots from its hide he would return before they had all worn through.

Jack set off. He used a sword given him by the King to chop toe holds in the Great Tree. He climbed for a year and a day, gradually wearing out his coats and boots. Eventually he arrived at the topmost leaf which sprung him up into a world above, much the same as the one below, in which there was a garden and a castle and..

the Princess…

who hid him so she could introduce him properly to the fearsome three headed Dragon who was lord of this realm and a bit of a stickler being particularly hot on good manners. When the time came she revealed him,

‘My lord, this is my swineherd Jack who has come to serve me.’

‘Well, we might have a use for you,’ said the Dragon and showed Jack the stables where there were a large number of sleek horses. In a corner and all alone was a thin, miserable horse. The Dragon cautioned Jack never to give this horse what it asks for. ‘If it asks for hay give it oats, if it asks for oats give it water.’

As Jack goes about his duties, the Thin Horse says, ‘ ‘I know your purpose Jack and I can help you. Ask the Princess to find out the source of the Dragon’s strength and then come and tell me.” Jack talks to the Princess who invites the Dragon to have a few drinks with her and manages to persuade him to tell his secret. ‘Out in the forest is a Silver Bear, split its skull and find a Rabbit, split that skull and find a box with nine Wasps in it. Kill the Wasps and I will lose my strength.’

Jack tells all this to the Thin Horse who then asks him to fetch embers from the fire for him to eat. Once he has eaten the coals he transforms into a golden stallion with five legs. Off they went into the forest to find the Silver Bear in whom they find the Rabbit and within that the box of Wasps. The Dragon’s strength is broken and the now Golden Horse then flies Princess and Swineherd back home where Jack is made King.

Our story begins with the Giant Tree. You may be sure it was there way, way before the first King came along and decided to throw a fence around it. And you may be sure that the Tree had feelings about being ‘owned’ and responded in poetic kind by abducting the Princess. The price paid for the King’s presumption is the loss of the Principle of Relatedness with all her nascent, creative, possibility.

In many ancient cultures the World Tree connected Heaven and Earth. Yggrdasil, the origin of our Christmas Tree tradition, represented a living connection to the Divine.

The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 321.

In our story emerging ego consciousness, the King, has become inflated with the idea that the throne can do a better job as divine interlocutor and that the Tree is just one more plant in the royal garden, as if it could be the object of consciousness.

The Three headed Dragon as theriomorphic representation of the Tree seizes the Princess. None can save her, disdain for the Tree has put her beyond help. Only someone who can remember the old ways, who is humble and brave enough to take a pig’s advice before a King can help….

The metaphor of killing a Buffalo and making seven jackets and seven boots from it is very much like the task of the protagonist in ‘Bearskin’ who must kill a bear and wear its pelt for seven years. To wear the skin of an animal is to deliberately identify with it and its protective powers. Buffalo was the power that made city states and kings possible. It was associated with the Gods Enlil and Enki in the Mesopotamian tradition and so the killing of the Buffalo is invocation of protection from ancient maternal goddesses akin to Egyptian Hathor and the sacred cows of India. The Swineherd knows how to approach the Tree in the right way..

The Great Mother is ritually propitiated and her skin worn as an amulet against being swallowed up like all his predecessors. The gradual wearing out of the seven coats as he ascends the Tree is reminiscent of Inanna’s descent and the seven stages of her disrobing on the way to the Underworld of Erishkigal.

Jack has yet to dis-empower the Dragon who holds the Princess. This Dragon is the alchemical Mercurius, an ancient God as yet undifferentiated into Good and Evil. His heads represent the trinity of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur, which preside over the various stages of Jack’s transformation. The way to dis-empower this dangerous aspect of the Psyche is not head on but by way of the inferior function, the Thin Horse, the wounded healer.

‘The magic horse or Taltos is also the same Hungarian word for shaman, or people with shamanistic knowledge, so it is not a far reach to connect the figure of the horse-spirit to more ancient symbols.’ Zalka Csenge Virág

The Thin Horse is even older than Mercurius. He belongs to the era of the Hunter Gatherer for whom everything, but mostly fire, was alive. As in Grimm’s story of ‘The Dragon and his Grandmother’, this more ancient spirit knows how to outwit the fearsome Dragon. She lulls him into a stupor and lets him boast how clever he has been.

Then Jack must give embers to the Thin Horse. He has to trust and feed the primal part of his being with life giving embers without which there is no transformation. This Promethean gift rejuvenates connection to ancient psychic roots and helps resolve the Dragon’s riddle obliquely. In the ‘Dragon and His Grandmother’ the riddle has this same quality of something impossible to know. The protagonists first meal in Hell shall be found in a really obscure place you could never guess or figure out.

‘In the great North Sea lies a dead dog-fish, that shall be your roast meat, and the rib of a whale shall be your silver spoon, and an old horses hoof as a wine glass.’ Grimm’s

Jack succeeds not because he’s clever or heroic but because he connects with the Thin Horse, remembers his aboriginal self and trusts in its directions. The source of the Dragon’s power, a box of wasps in a rabbit in a silver bear deep in the forest, is something that you can never know except that you gain help and trust.

In this older version of the story there is no chopping down of The Tree. By the time the story reaches, ‘Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman’, the Princess is written out of the story, The Tree is felled, Jack is no longer crowned and has to go back to living with his Mum.

I once had a friend who told me he had a dream whereby he cut down a Great Tree. He was hospitalized three weeks later. I discovered him standing naked, knee deep in shredded paper with a box of matches in one hand and a can of kerosene in the other. Gibbering. Men in white coats took him away.

Years ago and far away there lived a Rich Man with his three sons. One day his house burned down, which came as a terrible shock because he only had four others. What if another should burn down? What would then become of his sons’ fortune? And so he called them to him and told them they all had to go out and get jobs. The first became a soldier, the second a blacksmith and the third a barber. Each went off to ply their trade.

The Rich Man then went to see the Priest, unnerved by his loss and with conscience inexplicably pricked, as though he had tempted this fate. The Priest reminded him that he had become rich at the expense of others and would likely go to hell. Doubly un-nerved the Rich Man went back to his empty house and sat out his days with this new fire under his chair, contemplating his situation.

On his death bed he called his three sons to see him one last time. Three large bags of gold sat on the dresser. ‘Well my sons, my time has come. Before I die let me hear what you have accomplished so I may apportion your inheritance accordingly.’

The soldier stepped forward,’ I am the greatest of the king’s men,’ he said proudly. ‘I have fought in great wars and can wield my silver sword with such speed as to keep the rain from my head.’

Then the Blacksmith, ‘I am the greatest Smith in the land, why, I shod a coach of four horses without them even stopping in the yard.’

And the Barber, ‘I am so skilled with a razor I shaved a rabbit as it hopped along without a single nick.’

‘Well,’ chuckled the Rich Man as he tucked the bags of gold back into the dresser, ‘you have all the skill to make your own fortune and thus have no need of mine. Now call the Priest, for all this gold shall be given to the poor.’

One way of understanding ancient stories is to see them as amplifications and embellishments of collective situations in the objective psyche. Since this is the express purpose of alchemy it shouldn’t surprise us to see alchemical motifs cropping up in folk tales on a regular basis. This is useful because it gives otherwise overwhelmingly complex symbolism a sense of coherent narrative.

One of the most mind bending figures to grasp in the alchemical lexicon, not to mention up close and personal, is Mercurius. He has so many names and attributes it just gets confusing. Having a story to show how Mercurius operates can help to clear the mental fog a little.

Our story begins with a soul in crisis. The Rich man has been struck a great blow by fate. His house has burned down. His structure suddenly got eaten up somehow. He’s concerned about his sons’ legacy but so too has his conscience been aroused. He knows the fire is somehow an expression of something to do with him. This fire seems to have such a quality of divine intervention to it his first response is rush off to the Priest.

Our Rich Man finds himself in much the same situation as Job from the Old Testament. Here Job faces the dual nature of God, the ancient God who still likes to play dice with his Dark Brother and visit terrible shite on humans just to see what they do with it.

For his part, the Rich Man is compelled to realize the limits of his well padded personality to provide itself with meaning. Not only his wealth, but also his personal virtues and accomplishments cannot give more than ephemeral happiness. He has achieved all his personal goals but cannot enjoy them because he has no relatedness. Moreover, his wealth is ill-gotten. He has become inflated. Such an attitude, ‘beckons the Raven’s claw.’

In Irish mythology this aspect of Mercurius as divine fire is told in a story about a lonely Crofter who decides to use an ancient standing stone in his field as a door lintel. He is about to strike at the base of the stone with his pick axe when suddenly he has a flash of inspiration that his house is about to burn down. He runs back but its still in one piece so he returns to the field with greater resolve and once again swings his pick. Again, the sudden vision of flames consuming his croft so, once more, he legs it home, to find all is well…

The Crofter has had enough of all this nonsense by now and feels like a fool with all this running up and down so he swings his pick like a hero, gauges out the stone, heaves it into his barrow and trundles happily home… though, it is no more… having been razed to the ground.

Natural calamities are often experienced as a message from the gods with the essential feature being that the recipient and their attitude are transformed in the process. Mercurius, winged messenger, is all too often also experienced as a destructive and consuming fire., whether as the flames of some passion which sabotage intentions or as the baptism by fire of untoward events without which we would continue in the existential rut we find ourselves.

The cure for such ennui is an encounter with the Unconscious though the way this often happens is like being swallowed up by something. The sudden reappraisal of the ego’s place in the grander scheme of things, is disorienting, dissolving. It seems unfair. You have fulfilled the requirements of developing a golden and shiny personality with bags of success and suddenly you can’t get out of bed in the morning.

I dreamed I was taking a stroll on a sunny day. Suddenly I round the bend in the lane and there is a twelve foot tall Yeti who lumbers over to me, grabs me, throws me over his shoulder and takes off at high speed, leaping the hedgerows as though they were not there…

suddenly the rules are different. Your shiny golden self is captive.

Can you imagine being the first person to have both the curiosity and the means to put gold and mercury together…. watching with incredulous horror as the gold, the symbol of personal worth and worldly value aurum vulgaris, is eaten up and obliterated by otherworldly Mercury?

Yet this crisis does galvanize the Rich Man. He rouses his indolent and undifferentiated sons, sending them out into the world. He then goes off to see the Priest a less elemental personification of Mercurius, in a now slightly more benevolent form, who takes the time to spell out the link between house-fire and hell-fire..

‘since the ignis mercurialis was also connected with the fires of hell CW13 ¶ 256

Suddenly there’s a lot more at stake. The Rich Man goes home to think about things. He gives his sons jobs and sends them out into the world, dis-identifying from the personality and its various shenanigans. In the process, Mercurius becomes more benevolent still, ultimately manifesting within the Rich Man himself as the trickster’s fire of inspiration, which then transforms and redeems him.

‘Go, sweep out the chambers of your heart. When you depart out, He will enter in. In you, void of yourself, will He display His beauty.’ Shabastari.

Our story echoes the Vedic idea that the gods show us the face we show to them. If we pursue our personal goals with impunity we arouse the Ire of Mercurius. When the Gods are taken seriously the personality flourishes and fulfills its potential, eventually becoming a vessel for wisdom and relatedness.