The Shadow King’s Gold.

Long ago, there ruled a King of Perfect Order. His crown was of pure gold. His robes were pure white. His laws were just and.. well, whatever he decided that day. Under his rule, every field bore grain. Every river ran full. Every tower stood straight. He believed nothing existed that he could not see. The world was what he knew of it. And because of this, he believed himself complete. He gathered flattering courtiers about him who understood the king should never be questioned. They plied him with gold, fed his lusts, erected his statues and indulged every whim. Nothing was denied him. No law constrained him. None drew breath without permission.

But beneath the roots of his kingdom, something waited.

At first, it was only a subtle change. Former envoys from neighbouring lands no longer paid tribute. Allies fell away. His lackeys began to bicker with one another. Servants whispered uneasily. Animals grew restless at night. The fruit ripened more slowly in the orchards. The land grew dry. People fell sick. The King noticed none of it. He studied his maps, invaded some places, killed a few enemies. He polished his crown. He issued decrees. But the land no longer listened. The rivers withdrew into themselves. The grain stores slowly emptied. The market places grew silent. And one morning, when the King rose, he felt a heaviness in his limbs. His strength had begun to leave him. No physician could explain it. No priest could cure it. He grew weaker with each passing day. His crown grew heavy on his head.

One night, as he lay unable to sleep, an uncomfortable niggle at the back of his mind became an actual thought… And it was this, even though he could do whatever he wanted, make people disappear, make laws, make whoopee, make his courtiers praise and flatter and adore, he couldn’t fill himself up, he couldn’t make himself happy. He had given it his best shot, stuffed himself like a pig on other people’s lands, wives, daughters, grain stores and livestock, but somehow still felt.. empty.

Suddenly he saw someone, something, something wraithlike, standing in the corner of his chamber. It was perhaps a man, not merely clothed in black—but black as though made of shadow and earth. His eyes shone like distant stars. The King tried to speak, but his voice failed him. The dark figure spoke instead. “You must come with me” he said. The King trembled with rage. “I am eternal master here,” he whispered hoarsely. The shadowy man said nothing. He only extended his hand. And though the King resisted, he found himself rising and following the dread figure down stone steps which seemed somehow to have been freshly cut into the floor.

The murky shade led him beneath the castle. Down and down and down, deeper and deeper, through corridors the King had never seen, along bechasmed galleries, down spiral staircases that had no end, down into the roots of the earth. The way narrowed until the roof tipped his crown from his head and the rough hewn walls pressed in on all sides. He lost his cloak and somehow his slippers. At last, squeezing along, they came to a tiny chamber sealed in glass, filled entirely with a stone plinth just large enough to lie on.. “This is your kingdom also,” said the dark figure. Before the King could answer, the chamber closed around him. He was alone. Time ceased. His strength abandon him completely. He lay down. His breath slowed. His thoughts dissolved. And there, in darkness, the King died.

The king’s body slowly changed. His skin darkened. His robes blackened. His flesh became like ash. He lay in darkness, without movement, without voice, without will. Above him, the kingdom forgot him. His name faded. His laws dissolved.

After an age without measure, water began to fall. A single drop at first. Then another. Then a stream, warm, scented, humming, loving. Slowly, imperceptibly, something began to change. The blackness softened. The rigidity loosened into… a feeling. The feeling became… awareness, of something which had been incomplete.

He opened his eyes. He felt, different, relaxed, composed. He rose, not as the King who had descended, nor as the corpse who had lain in darkness but as something, someone, new. His body felt.. whole. His strength had returned. But it was not the strength of dominion. It was the strength of Being. He looked at his hands. They shone. Not with the gold of his crown. But with a deeper gold. A living gold which seemed to have emerged from within him.

The chamber opened. He rose up through the earth. Up through the forgotten corridors. Up into the light. The kingdom lay before him, but not as it had been. It was more alive than before. The rivers gurgled and flowed. The trees bore fruit. The scent of myriad herbs was borne on the wind. Insects buzzed. Children laughed and played. The air itself seemed awake. And the King understood. He had not regained his kingdom. He had become worthy of it. The gold he had worn before had been an ornament. The gold he now embodied was his substance. He ruled again, not as master but as steward, as one who had died to avarice and been reborn into plenty.

There is a misconception about shadow work which really gets in the way. The idea that it is something you ‘do’ is just more egotism which adds to the already problematic inflation. ‘Working on yourself’ is dangerously close to what Søren Kierkegaard describes in ‘The Sickness Unto Death’, as the “despair of wanting to be oneself”, a spiritual condition where a person defiantly continues to sustain their identity, doubling down, actively insisting on being their own creator, mason to their own stone. By trying to be so self-sufficient, to author their own growth, the person becomes trapped in isolation, endlessly struggling to stabilise an identity which cannot be self-secured. Such despair is deeper than helplessness because it contains pride and defiance: the refusal to accept any deeper foundation. This results in a self that is intensely assertive yet inwardly fractured and unstable.

The rejected, denied, or disowned aspects of one’s personality cannot be approached with the intellectual desire to ‘integrate’ them. ‘Working’ on your ‘negative emotions’ is a contradiction in terms. For as long as an emotion is labelled negative there is nothing you can do about it. Shaming your shame consolidates it. This is why William Blake says, ‘he who persists in his folly will become wise.’

The shadow is ‘that which one has no wish to be,’ (Jung) not simply because it is ‘bad’ or inferior but because it demands we renounce the magical thinking of wishing ourselves into a preferred existence. Sugar and spice and all things nice…. or even slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails, so long as the contents hang together comfortably. To be both sugar and spice and slugs and snails is just a big mess that hardly feels like ‘growth’ at all.

And yet… without this discomfort we are bound to be unconsciously identified with the shadow and act it out, denial leading directly to a form of possession exemplified by an aphorism of Nietzsche…

“I have done that,” says my memory.
“I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable.
At last—memory yields.

The persona can become inexorable and unable to be persuaded. Material facts are like chaff in the wind when faced with the survival instincts of self image. You can present someone with incontrovertible proof of something, but if it runs contrary to their belief system it is worse than useless, you will only be perceived as attacking them. This is one of the reasons dreamwork is so useful, because the commentary is coming from within.

Internal collapse of ‘the old outmoded dispensation’ (Yeats) is what the alchemists termed ‘Nigredo’, the blackening. It is commonly experienced as depression, burnout, the painful end of a relationship, not knowing who you are anymore, feeling inauthentic, a loss of purpose or direction, feeling disillusioned. Falling ill.

Shadow work is the felt sense that such things are experiences of incompleteness. You are depressed for a reason. You are burnt out because you are excessively driven or in the wrong job. The relationship is over because one of you outgrew the other, or you got complacent. Or you caught yourself habitually sweeping your truth under the rug to keep the peace and are losing yourself in the process.

Existence requires both creation and destruction. We do not grow incrementally. We grow via a series of deaths. Analyst Michael Fordham calls it ‘deintegration’. The old structure has to collapse more than a little in order for the new one to emerge. The instinct for change and growth is paradoxically dependent on an equally powerful instinct to chop down the old wood. The dark figure, our split off wholeness, seems ‘negative’ because it ends the hegemony of persona, the King’s illusion of primacy.

When the inner descent is renounced it becomes defensive acts of dissent instead. ‘Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf,’ ML von Franz will remind us, ‘it will turn around and bite you.’ If the ashes of destruction and the death of the old way of being are not entered into they get played out in the world instead.

Mythologically, Eros and Thanatos are complementary cosmic forces. Eros creates and binds life into form, while Thanatos dissolves it back into formlessness, together sustaining the eternal cycle of existence. Thanatos, which Plato felt was contained within Eros itself, has to have expression somewhere. The grandiose persona can only be identified with eternally by aggressive self-maintenance, all of which needs enemies out there, across the Gulf of America, and one form or another of tearing down your house.

Happily, what the shadow also brings alongside the down going and its feelings of diminishment and collapse, is the subsequent quickening once the nadir is passed, once soul is given time and space to get involved, giving rise to a sense of being restored to oneself, of developing a propitious attitude, of feeling golden and grateful.

The Selfish Giant.

Adapted from and with apologies to Oscar Wilde.

Every afternoon, when school was over, the children went to play in the Giant’s garden. It was a large, lovely garden, with soft green grass, blossoms like stars, and twelve peach trees that were covered with delicate flowers in spring and in autumn bore rich fruit. Birds sang in the trees, and the children laughed as they played.

One day the Giant returned from visiting his friend, the Cornish ogre. When he saw the children playing in his garden he grew angry.

“What are you doing here?” he cried, and shook his fist. Then he built a high wall all around it and put up official and threatening notices to…

Keep Out.

He was a very selfish Giant.

Soon, spring came. All over the country there were little blossoms and birds, but in the Giant’s garden it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing there, as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom.

The only ones who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried, “so we will live here all the year round.” The Snow covered the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he roared all day long and blew down the chimneys.

“I cannot understand why the spring is so late in coming,” said the selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden.

One morning he heard some lovely music. It was a little linnet singing outside his window. He jumped out of bed and looked out. Spring had come at last—but only into one corner of the garden. The children had crept in through a little hole in the wall, and wherever there was a child, there was spring. The trees were covered with blossoms, and the birds were singing happily.

But in one corner it was still winter. There stood a little boy who was so small that he could not climb up into the tree. He wandered round, crying bitterly, while the tree remained covered with snow and frost.

The Giant’s heart melted as he looked out. “How selfish I have been!” he said. “Now I know why the spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground forever and ever.”

He crept downstairs and went out quietly into the garden. When the children saw him, they were so frightened that they ran away. All except the little boy, who was crying so hard he did not see the Giant coming. The Giant took him gently in his hand and put him up into the tree. At once the tree broke into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it. The little boy stretched out his arms and kissed the Giant.

When the other children saw this, they came running back, and with them came the spring. The Giant knocked down the wall, and in the afternoon, when the people were going to market, they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

All day they played, and in the evening the children went home. But the little boy did not return. The Giant looked for him everywhere, but he could not find him. He loved him best, because the boy had kissed him.

Years went by, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could no longer play, so he sat in a great armchair and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden.

One winter morning he looked out and saw the little boy again, standing under a tree in a far corner of the garden. The tree was covered with white blossoms. But the boy had wounds on his hands and on his feet.

“Who has dared to wound you?” cried the Giant. “Tell me, that I may take my great sword and slay him.”

“Nay,” answered the child. “These are the wounds of Love.”

The Giant knelt before him. “Who are you?” he asked with strange awe.

But the child smiled at the Giant and said, “You let me play once in your garden. Today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”

That afternoon, when the children came to play, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

………………………………………

Sometimes stories tell us about what has happened. Sometimes they are about what’s needed. But what is it about an apology that makes it so necessary? Why should another’s contrition matter so much? Are we not grown-ups and responsible for our own reactions to life…?

Oscar Wilde’s story shows us that there is much more here than meets the eye, moral restitution certainly but also the healing of self-estrangement, a feeling of fulfilment and a sense of spiritual redemption.

Unacknowledged hurt not only leaves the wound open, it begins to deny its existence. Only the enlightened need no co-determinant of truth. The rest of us require some kind of mirror to our experience without which it is too burdensome to hold onto oneself and becomes lost. Restorative justice programmes like the Sycamore Tree Programme, where offenders learn about the impact of crime and may make symbolic amends including apologies, have been as successful as they are because they focus on the principle that personal stability and peace depends on whether you are square with the world. Participants have described the experience as life changing, citing a renewed sense of purpose and confidence.

Facilitation of such a programme is based on the understanding that witnessing and symbolic gesture fulfil a developmental need which has been internally walled off.. If a parent walls themselves off from the child, then the child will become walled off from their own emotional self, ‘by a similarly rigid and impervious wall.’ (Wright)

This walling off is, paradoxically, part of the instinct for self-preservation.. It operates to diminish dissonance and the epistemic anxiety of being out of step with a powerful other. Analyst Sandor Firenczi called it, ‘identification with the aggressor’, later developed by Fairbairn who emphasised that the assumption of guilt is protection from feelings of helplessness. Such a strategy is profoundly effective, agency is restored, but the price is self recrimination and being eternally out of kilter with yourself.

Reality is a consensual thing. Our earliest learning and instinct is to look for ourselves in the eyes of others. ‘The mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there.’ (Winnicott 1967) So, if what he sees is impassive, or dead, that’s what he takes himself for. Sense of self is rooted in what others mirror back to us which is why being isolated is so frightening. Without outer reference points one’s internal way markers are also lost.

This makes being at odds with one another rather loaded. Having your perspective challenged can feel as though reality as well as pride were at stake. Likewise, proper restitution can feel soul restoring as well as mere vindication.

Interpersonal reparation, the recognition of oneself in the other is, at one and the same time, an intrapsychic process. Each party walks away returned to latterly estranged aspects of themselves by the encounter. The plaintiff, by virtue of having their honour realised is given back value which had in effect been stolen. Remorse, however, gains far more. Conscience is not only unburdened but atoned. There is a new reality as well as a new perception because repair to the other also initiates into wider and more benevolent internal landscapes.

The experience of recognition is ‘to know again’. Its first linguistic cousin is ‘reconstrue’, sharing a grandparent in the old French, ‘reconuistre’, to acknowledge, to be real to the other. Being real to the other reconstrues the world into one now brighter, more solid underfoot.

From our story it is clear that apology is transformational as well as restorative. The selfish Giant experiences himself in a whole new way. He realises the winter of his discontent is of his own making. This embodied humility releases him from the icy grip of moral rectitude and superior unrelatedness into a burgeoning spring of shared meaning and enriched identity. The Selfish Giant is more than sorry, he has crossed a threshold in himself beyond which other people’s feelings are not just his responsibility but his treasure.

What if the selfish giant, whilst personified by Trump, isn’t actually something that infects and possesses us all in some measure? What if the answer was not so much to eject/impeach the man but to reflect upon how he is an emblem of our age, not an aberration at all but the logical conclusion and expression of something which runs through the soul Western Civilisation and has its say around the breakfast table as well as emanating from the halls of corporate greed. How might the echelons of power evolve if we collectively developed the habit of checking with ourselves to see if we are square with our neighbour. What if loving your neighbour as yourself were not so much a moral injunction as a whispered secret of happiness?

Greedylocks and the Three Bears.

Long ago, deep in a cold forest, there lived three bears. One morning, the bears left their home to pick berries and let their porridge cool. Not long after, a cloaked figure slipped from the road. In some versions of the story this figure is a beggar; in others, a thief. Seeing the empty cottage, she tried the door. It was unlocked.

Inside, the smell of food. Without a thought she tasted the largest bowl but it was too hot to eat directly. The next was too cold and who can be bothered….. The smallest she could gulp down straight away and so she ate every last bite. Growing bolder, she tested the chairs. The first held firm. The second sagged. The third shattered beneath her weight.

Upstairs, she tried the beds. The first was hard as wood. The second was soft but stifling. The third was all there was left and so she helped herself and fell asleep.

When the bears returned, they smelled her immediately. Someone had been in their home. They found the empty bowl. The broken chair. And then, following the muddy trail upstairs, they found her sprawled across Baby Bear’s bed still wearing her shoes.

In the oldest tellings of this fairy story Goldilocks does not escape.

Some say the bears dragged her into the forest and she was never seen again. Others say she leapt from the window in terror and broke her neck on the rocks below. In a few less polite versions, the bears killed her outright for violating their home — not out of cruelty, but because in the wild, trespass means danger.

The tale ends not with happy ever after, but with a warning:

Do not enter what is not yours.
Do not take what you did not earn.
Do not assume the world is gentle simply because it looks quiet.

I once dated a woman who was very hard to please. But I was determined and did everything I could to make her happy. Nothing satisfied. Eventually, like Putin at Petrovsk, I poured all my considerable resources into one final push. I thought that if I rolled all her favourite things into one grand gesture I could finally win her heart. So, I made a list of all the things she loved: medieval architecture, summer skies, picnic baskets with green olives, Prosecco and parma ham, sunsets and country vistas. On the appointed day, I drove us out to the site of an ancient chapel atop a hill on Dartmoor in late August with a hamper full of Crisp apple strudels and Schnitzel with noodles. It was perfect.

The sun was setting. The sky was aglow with reds and pinks. The ancient chapel oozed romance and chivalry. The hamper spilled with tasty snacks. We sat down on the soft grass of the churchyard and took in the breathtaking views across golden valleys and bubbling streams. She looked out at it all with childlike wonder and exclaimed,’its beautiful…’

..’but’, and her brow darkened, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set, ‘why haven’t you bought me here before?’

Of course the ingratitude on her part and the despair on mine rode rough shod over being able to see the unutterable poverty of her inner world which nothing could satisfy. Greed is something which so snags our moral sensibilities it is difficult to see past it to the gnawing pit of ravenous hunger it is so furiously unable to fill.

Hunger becomes greed at the point when we give up on the hope of ever receiving what we need. If I cannot receive I have to take. If taking won’t fill, as it rarely does, then the good thing must be spoiled so you can’t have it either. Even if you are willing to share. The agony of greed is not only that the world must be experienced as withholding and impoverished but that good things must quickly be refused even when they are available because the person’s attention has shifted away from hope and sharing to confirmation that the world and everything in it has no value. Sense of self has become coalesced around inner poverty which then requires the emptiness to be maintained for the sake of a stable self structure. Plenty is threatening to a core identity adapted to the absence of love/nurture and so the person finds themselves in the awful bind of having to negate and dismiss what is most needed even when it is at hand.

This is tragic for the individual. It’s catastrophic when it becomes collective, when it begins to determine international policy. Allies must be denigrated, resources plundered, homes invaded, people snatched. Not only is there never enough but whatever is available must be repudiated for the sake of consistency. It is enough to make anyone want to destructively lash out .. and bigly. Greed has a deathly quality. It does not just want something for itself. It wants the good in the other to be destroyed so it doesn’t feel inferior or dependent. Greed wants to annihilate the source of good, not just acquire it.

This leads to the kind of corrosive complacency which takes no thought for consequences or tomorrow. Goldilocks doesn’t concern herself with what might happen if she remains in the home she has invaded. She’s unable to reflect on the result of either her theft of the porridge or the damage done to the chair. She just falls asleep and buries her head until she is overtaken by events.

Greed can’t use what it takes, so good things must be devalued and friends humiliated. Trump’s recent Davos speech confused Greenland with Iceland four times, so little did he care about what was so important only days or hours before. But the kicker was the astonishing denial of the role of America’s allies during WW11 and more particularly the denial of England’s 457 fallen heroes in Afghanistan. He’s not just wrong or misinformed. More importantly, it’s that contempt for others and the need to be hated by them have come to replace the unmourned loss of absent love and nurture. He needs to be controversial. He wants your outrage. Identity must be rooted in at least something and in the absence of love and respect, hate and vilification will do.

If only Trump were an anomaly. Unfortunately he is only the most recent iteration of a long standing tradition, enabled by an emotionally starved collective still telling ourselves that we are the avatars of civilisation, cramming ourselves with stuff we don’t need whilst others starve. Let’s at least not deceive ourselves. The underbelly of our vaunted sophistication is sophistry; the clever use of lies and deception. Nothing will change much until we face the honest shame of our collective responsibility in allowing such a scumbag to succeed, until we face the fact that the long line of despots and tyrants in our culture are the logical conclusion of two thousand years or more of vengeful male Gods with all the emotional intelligence and relatedness of the average tape worm.

In the original story of Goldilocks she doesn’t get tired of winning. The bears have her, not because they are violent but because her waste, destructiveness and insatiability are dangerous to all the other animals in the woods who understand that what befalls one of them becomes the fate of all.

The Rape of America.

One of the most dangerous misconceptions about Narcissism is that it is about the lack of something. Author Bruno Bettleheim uses the metaphor of ‘The Empty Fortress’, to convey this idea, that the Narcissist is just a bunch of defences surrounding a vacuum, forgetting that the fortress is empty because its contents have been projected. Shakespeare seems to concur with Bettleheim in Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

“It (life) is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare is describing what life looks like from inside a soul that has destroyed its own moral centre. He seems to be saying that when you live as if nothing matters, the world eventually appears to mean nothing. Though this is hardly enough. After all, both Lord Duncan and the Queen lie dead…

In common parlance we speak about the Narcissist, ‘lacking empathy’, as though the problem was simply that they had something missing. Well wishers wonder if they could ‘learn’, as though what was required was simply a matter of corrective instruction.

Yet this is far from the truth and perhaps reflects the desire on behalf of said enablers to bury their heads in the sand whilst the malignant wrecking ball sweeps past their tail feathers.

In fact, the Narcissist is far from empty or beset by ‘lack’. The problem is not so much the absence of something positive, relatedness and connection, but the presence of something which regards such virtues as weakness and aberration.

The prime concern of Narcissism is to rid the fortress of unbearable feelings. It’s empty because its contents have been evacuated. The oft vaunted attributes of Narcissism, pride, arrogance, superiority, can only be had once one’s system is shot of vulnerability and human frailty. These unwanted feelings have to be projected onto some unwitting other which then brings the person into immediate conflict with his neighbour. In the special case of malignant narcissism, projection is not quite enough. Projections don’t always stick.

You might attribute your neighbour with weakness and stupidity but she is always free to disagree. Unless you actually make her feel weak and stupid. The malignant narcissist differs from his more common or garden cousin by the need to make sure that the projection sticks. It’s not enough to simply assert the other is weak and stupid,. You have to get them to agree. It’s called projective identification. I project my shit onto you and get you to claim it as your own, making you feel as though I am not merely insulting you but correctly identifying that you are indeed a piece of crap.

One of the most heinous manifestations of this is rape. Rape is not about sex, Rape is about the need to humiliate in such a way that the raped other is forced to carry and identify with the feelings of worthlessness and inferiority which so interrupt and interfere with narcissistic hauteur.

In May 2023, a New York civil jury found Trump liable in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation related to an incident in the mid-1990s. Because this was a civil case (a lawsuit for damages), the jury did not criminally convict him of rape though he was ordered to pay damages. Some legal commentary said the conduct involved ‘non-consensual penetration’. Trump himself confessed, in the Hollywood access tapes, to ‘pussy grabbing’… He qualified his behaviour, ‘when you are a celebrity, they let you do it.’

Even more disturbing are the multiple accusations from underage girls at the time of being raped by Trump and his best mate Jeffrey Epstein over many years, all of which Trump has done his utmost to keep concealed from the public eye, both by DOJ withholding and the various distractions of Venezuela and Greenland. It does seem rather ironic that this deflection from public scrutiny of his sexual ‘indiscretions’ should be the penetration of one sovereign nation and the threat to ‘have’ another, ‘whether they like it or not’, which of course is rapist language.

It’s not simply that the malignant narcissist does not care. Lack of empathy is the least of your worries. What is so dangerous is the ontological need to make others suffer so that he does not. The wish to make others suffer is not just sadistic. The enjoyment of the pain, exulting over the degradation of others is an existential necessity, the glue that holds the fraying threads of mental imbalance in some semblance of order.

Governance, logic, international relations, all play second fiddle to the self preservation of unloading inferiority and humiliation into others. The recent runway interview at Davos was a prime example. When told that French president Macron had declined his 1 billion dollar ‘invitation’ (protection racket) to the ‘Board of Peace’, his response was a shaming, ‘no-one wants him’. Of course, Macron’s refusal was on the back of a written invitation which he would not have been offered unless Trump wanted him. Logic and international relations simply go to the wall in the face of the urgent need to demean, rubbish and humiliate. Say whatever is needed to rid hated feelings of being unloved. Even if it makes you look stupid; those feelings too can be shed in time, as they were only hours later with his demeanment of China’s (successful) wind farm programme.

If only Trump’s pussy grabbing was confined to those he considers enemies or sufficiently unprotected to be inconsequential. Lady America herself is not safe from the ravages of malignant offloading. ‘Going in’, to maiden cities with national guards and the unaccountable and deadly violations of ICE agents, who are really extensions of Uncle Donald’s feverish paws, ensure the continued humiliation of millions so that he doesn’t have to be afflicted by his own painful feelings. Someone else can be made to feel the pain on his behalf, in their countless droves.

Why? Because hatred comes first; the target is constructed afterward. In so doing you get others carry and identify with all the loathsome emotions of worthlessness so urgently in need of disinvestment such that a polished persona based on the fragile ground of self congratulation can be maintained. The world must be shat on or incorporated, the sovereign autonomy of girls and nations violated, all so that the Emperor Baby and his minions can sleep easy at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacobus de Voragine tells us..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mammon’s Quiet Ledger

I asked AI to tell me a story about Mammon, the god of gain and greed. I had been wondering about his role in the recent land grab of Venezuela. It gave me this. I was amazed. I hope you are too. I’ll comment afterwards.

Mammon lived in a house with no windows.

It wasn’t that he disliked light; he simply preferred reflections. Polished floors caught the glimmer of chandeliers, mirrors doubled every flame, and gold—ah, the gold—turned even shadows into something worth possessing. Coins lined the walls like scales on a dragon, each stamped with the faces of kings who had begged Mammon for favor and cursed him in the same breath.

People said Mammon was a demon, and perhaps he was. But demons, like virtues, are often made by repetition.

Each morning Mammon opened his great ledger. Its pages were thin as skin and endless as appetite. Names appeared on their own, written by hands that were not his. Beside each name bloomed columns of numbers: debts, profits, losses, interest compounding like a slow spell.

One evening, a girl arrived at his door. No guards stopped her—there never were any. Those who came to Mammon arrived because something inside them had already unlocked the gate.

She carried nothing but a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth.

“I want to make a bargain,” she said.

Mammon gestured, and a chair shaped itself from coins. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t want gold,” she said quickly. “Or jewels. Or land.”

Mammon paused. This was unusual, not unprecedented, but unusual enough to be interesting.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Time. For my father. He’s dying. If he had one more year, he could finish teaching me his trade. One more year and I won’t starve when he’s gone.”

Mammon turned a page in his ledger. Her father’s name was already there, the ink faint, the balance nearly zero.

“One year is expensive,” Mammon said. “What will you pay?”

The girl placed the loaf of bread on the table.

Mammon laughed, a sound like coins poured onto stone. “That wouldn’t buy a second.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

Mammon studied her. No trembling greed, no wild hope of riches—only fear sharpened into resolve. He had seen emperors offer their souls with less clarity.

“Very well,” Mammon said at last. “I’ll take what you value most.”

She swallowed. “My future earnings? My labor?”

Mammon shook his head. “Too common.”

He leaned forward, eyes reflecting her face back at her. “I will take your ability to want more than enough.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Mammon said gently. “When the year is done.”

The bargain sealed itself with a whisper. The loaf of bread turned to ash. The girl ran home, hope burning bright enough to blind her to the cost.

True to his word, Mammon adjusted the ledger. The father lived. A year passed. He taught his daughter everything he knew, and when he died, it was peacefully, with her hand in his.

The girl worked hard. She earned enough. She never went hungry.

But she never wanted more.

When others chased wealth, she stopped at sufficiency. When offered power, she declined. She gave excess away without ceremony or pride. Mammon watched as fortunes flowed around her like a river around a stone.

And for the first time in centuries, his ledger showed something strange.

A name with no growth.

Mammon found himself returning to that page often. Not in anger, but in curiosity. The numbers did not swell. They did not shrink. They simply were.

It unsettled him.

Mammon thrived on hunger—on the aching reach for more. Without it, gold was just metal. Power, just noise.

One night, Mammon closed his ledger and extinguished every light in his house of reflections. In the dark, surrounded by wealth that suddenly felt heavy and mute, he wondered—briefly, dangerously—what it might be like to be poor in desire.

…………………………….

Mammon got his first major career boost in the New Testament when Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Luke 16;13) He doesn’t say, “You cannot serve God and Satan,” which might make you wonder what the difference could be. The answer is that Satan is all about doing bad stuff, acts of wickedness, overt harm; whereas Mammon is a much more clandestine attitude of avarice and desire. Satan tempts people to evil deeds, whereas Mammon enslaves people with promises of security, status, and identity tied to riches.

Prior to his New Testament upgrade, Mammon was not elevated so highly in ancient times and so was far less of a problem. In early Aramaic usage, Mammon is not a deity/devil at all—just a neutral term for money or material possessions. From 500BC onwards, Jewish texts from this period often warn against trusting wealth instead of God. Mammon begins to carry a moral charge, wealth is dangerous when it becomes an object of trust or loyalty, though he is not yet personified as a demon.

In the original Greek text of the New Testament, Mamōnas is left untranslated, suggesting Mammon is more than money, it behaves more like a rival master. Scholars generally agree Jesus is portraying wealth as something that can command allegiance like a lord, yet at this stage Mammon is still not explicitly a demon but rather a spiritual power in the sense of a force which enslaves human loyalty.

By the second century Mammon has become far more substantial. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and others speak of Mammon as a false master, an idol and a demonic influence. Augustine emphasises that Mammon rules those who love riches, much as God rules those who love righteousness.

By the medieval period Mammon becomes increasingly personified. Gregory the Great (6th century) treats avarice as a ruling vice that enslaves the soul, though not a named demon as such. By the 12th century, Peter Lombard in Sentences (Book II) discusses Mammon as a dominus avaritiae (“lord of greed”) though Lombard stops short of a full biography. Then, in the work of William Langland (14th century), Mammon finally emerges as a personified power of corruption and greed, closely associated with hellish forces and moral decay, clearly operating as a diabolic power. By the 16thC, Binsfeld’s Classification of Demons. (1589) codifies medieval tradition, affording Mammon formal demonological canonization alongside the other lords of deadly sin, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Satan and Belphegor.

Mammon’s rise to power has been meteoric. From mere ‘thing or stuff’ to Keeper of Hell’s Treasury in two millennia. Could there be a connection to the equally meteoric and contiguous emergence of what Jung calls the ‘monotheism of consciousness’?

Back in the day you might choose your sacrifices according to which God it might seem most propitious to plea for increase. Mammon is wealth itself. The question ceases to be one of evoking the God’s abundance. It becomes one of amassing God as stuff. All of which means the more you have the more righteous you must be since there is now a direct link to be made between wealth and manna.

So it really shouldn’t surprise us to see all kinds of manifestations of this dotted increasingly through the ages to match Mammon’s trajectory from Bronze Age house elf into Lord of the Seventh Sin. Just before the time Jesus was flagging up Mammon’s cosmic debut, Roman senator Marcus Crassus had invaded Parthia because….. he just needed their gold, like, really badly. Once his ass had been thoroughly whipped at the battle of Carrhae, he was executed by the Parthian’s who killed him by poured molten gold down his throat, a kind of poetic underscoring of his enthralment to Mammon.

Plutarch (Life of Crassus) states explicitly that Crassus was driven by the desire for military glory to rival Caesar’s conquests in Gaul and Pompey’s victories in the East. He was motivated by greed for Parthian wealth. Plutarch writes, in essence, that Crassus sought neither justice nor necessity, but gold and reputation.

Crassus had at least some shame, presented the campaign as a defensive and stabilizing war to protect the Roman province of Syria and to check the wiles of Parthian power. He gave it some spin. Even Hitler, 2 millennia further into Mammon’s rise, claimed to be saving the Austrian people, saying they were being denied their right to self-determination. His invasion was cast as liberation and reunification.

No more. Mammon is now out front and centre. On Air Force One, being interviewed by reporters, US Senator Lindsay Graham interrupted Trump when asked about the invasion of Venezuela by a reporter, interjecting the time honoured ‘casus belli’, ‘there are going to be Americans alive today because he (Trump) shut down a narco-terrorist state..’ but the fakery was no longer necessary, When further prompted as to the possible plight of political prisoners and human rights violations, Trump dispensed with pretence, ‘We haven’t got to that, what we want to do is fix up the oil.’

AI’s story of ‘Mammon’s Quiet Ledger’ is so poignant because it seems to get underneath the gnawing issue of human greed and reframe it in such a way that it can be healed. The girl is free of grasping compulsion because of her love for her father and her proportionate need for and valuing of his wisdom. The Principle of Relatedness saves her from succumbing to Mammon’s influence. He is left not only wondering what it might be like to be free of the hunger which wants more than it needs, but is actively feeling the concomitant loss of power and influence effected by her devotion. This is something all of us can do. Every act of kindness, every gesture of love, leaves Mammon scratching his head, reducing his power in the world and even gaining grudging respect.

The Green Man.

Despite his striking image there are few stories about the Green Man. He tends to show up in disguise as Pan or Cerrunos, Bacchus or Radergast. One story, ’Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, casts him in the role of a self-regenerating warrior who rides into the castle keep of Camelot, bursting in on consciousness, challenging all present to fight him, one blow in return for another. Gawain accepts and beheads the knight thinking this might slow him down a bit, but the Green Knight just laughs. He picks up his head and rides off saying they will meet in a year and a day when the blow will be returned but not so readily endured.

Gawain undergoes a series of trials, secretly set by the Green Knight himself. He arrives finally at the appointed hour facing almost certain death. But Gawain is spared. The Green Knight, it now transpires, is acting on behalf of King Arthur and has been commissioned, along with Morgan le Fay, a powerful witch, to test the honour and bravery of Arthur’s knights. Here, the Green Knight seems to be a psychopomp of the individuation process. He not only tests but also helps and has compassion for his charges as he oversees their development.

I had always thought of the Green Man as quintessentially British, baked into the folklore but it turns out not to be so. The reason there are so few stories about the Green Man is perhaps because he is actually an immigrant to the British Isles. The Green Man migrated from India via Iran in the second century, Italy, France and `finally aboard the boats of Norman invaders who decorated churches all over Britain with his image.

The stage for the Green Man’s debut in Britain was set centuries before he arrived and thousands of miles away at the battle of Actium 31BCE. This was a battle fought between Marc Anthony and Cleopatra on the one side who supported the old Roman republic and Emperor Octavian who preferred a more direct approach to government and subsequently became the first Emperor of imperial Rome, the first God-Man. Octavian changed his name to Augustus, the Increaser, hinting at a divine or sacred authority. He proclaimed himself son of the Gods and replaced their images on Legionary standards with his own. He was not simply in charge.

It was with this newly minted imperial mind-set that his grand nephew Claudius then invaded Britain, an invasion which was now idealogical as well as territorial. There could be only one man-god. Claudius’ subsequent persecution of the religious orders of ancient Britain is legendary. He sent his general Suetonius to eradicate all native spiritual practice which he did most efficiently, destroying sacred sites and killing all members of the druidic order at that time.

A thousand years of Dark Ages passed, during which time the Green Man was making his way slowly across Asia Minor and Europe, drawn by this massive wound to the British psyche at the hands of imperial zeal whose rooting out and purging of the old gods had been both ruthless and systematic. Nature abhors a vacuum. By quirk of fate and 1066 the Roman church then brought to Britain gothic art and the compelling images of foliate heads on the doors and eves of its cathedrals.

For another thousand years the Green Man waited in the vaulted ceilings and stone masonry of the church, making it home. Then, on the brink of the Second World War and the orgy of destruction about to unfold from the industrial mechanisation of our world, Lady Raglan wrote an article first using the name, ‘the Green Man’ in the magazine ‘Folklore’. This so gripped public imagination that the Green Man was widely if retrospectively adopted as a national figure, albeit one of 20thC folklore, a symbol nevertheless around which some hope for regeneration and the rewilding of our collective imagination might gather. The Green Man’s response to imperial destruction is what you might expect given his reputation for regeneration. He came back.

The Green man is a trickster. Not only did he manage to smuggle himself into Britain but he gets himself quietly adopted by a culture which then agrees he was always there. Moreover, he will insist on sprouting, sometimes in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways but always in response to a need, a feeling of loss or fear or barrenness.

I wonder if the predominance of the Green Man’s image over actual stories about him of any kind isn’t testimony to how old he is, like the ice giants of Norse mythology or the Titans of Greek mythology. We have few details as such but more a sense of their energy and presence. The Green Man is elemental, unknown, save the disposition to surprise and delight, to restore and regenerate.

Whilst the Green Man is traditionally associated with seasonal cycles he is particularly connected to Spring because of this emphasis on regeneration, clinically relevant because it is really rather different from the idea of transformation. The Green Man could be thought of as a chthonic form of Mogenson’s ‘Dove in the consulting room’, to remind us that growth happens by itself once optimum light, warmth and soil are provided.

These different models find common ground in Hildegaard of Bingen’s ‘Viriditas’, latin for ‘greeness’, a dynamic principle of regenerative greening, a metaphor of life returning to an inhospitable inner land via natural processes which revitalise and invigorate, a response to difficult material surfacing in consciousness. Dream images of greening often herald new growth and change, the return of life, warmth, abundance. Simply being out in Nature is profoundly restorative, helping us connect with ourselves and underscoring what’s important in life, simple things and precious others.

Pinocchio. On wanting to be a real boy.

The story of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet who aspired to be a real boy, was originally intended as a cautionary tale by Italian author Carlo Collodi. Disney’s adaptation made him a lot more loveable but he still retained the narcissistic traits flagged up in the original version. Pinocchio refuses to adapt to the world much to the distress of his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and in sharp contrast to his to his otherwise fervent desire to become real.

Pinnochio’s regressive tendencies are personified by Cat and Fox who encourage his truancy from school. They also encourage him to explore the dubious delights of ‘Pleasure Island’ with its promises of endless gratification. There he allies himself with Lampwick a devil may care persona figure bent on self indulgence…

“Right here, boys! Right here! Get your cake, pie, dill pickles, and ice cream! Eat all you can! Be a glutton! Stuff yourselves! It’s all free, boys! It’s all free! Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!”

Unfortunately it all goes rather badly for them and Pinocchio only narrowly escapes being turned into a donkey by leaping blindly into the sea where he is swallowed by Monstro the whale, a Noah-like descent into the unconscious.

The story has strong moral overtones but more importantly it seems to represent something more than the fate of naughty boys. It is rather a developmental stage through which we must all pass with connotations more persuasive than the injunction to be good and with implications of profound import for our current political climate.

The utter shambles unfolding in America, the sexual sleaze of Epstein’s Pleasure Island, the cover ups and distractions, all have a way of evoking moral outrage from the rest of the world which, unfortunately, render us hamstrung in any attempt to explain the meaning of such corruption. Indignation, righteous as it might be, has a way of arresting enquiry into how the Trump phenomenon managed to unfold in the first place or what it might be which motivates either his inner circle or his MAGA base. The descent into autocracy cannot be explained from the moral high ground and we are left with reasons which seem insufficient, such as the desire for personal enrichment or the entrenchment of jobs and position. Their fawning puppetry demands deeper analysis.

During Trump’s canvassing for his first term he held a town hall in Iowa which he began with the question, ‘how stupid are the people of Iowa?’ This insult to the audience of proud Iowans was received with thunderous applause. Narcissistic co-dependence is typified by this kind of enabling. One of the most insidious reasons for this is the fervent conviction held by the abused that appeasement is the precursor to redemption. If only I try harder, wait long enough, humour sufficiently, demonstrate endless patience, the other will change and grow. Such beliefs are no less pathological than the abusive behaviour of the narcissist themselves. Both are deeply rooted in magical thinking.

When Pinnochio lies his nose grows. He’s genuinely surprised about this because he is not yet a real boy who can tell fact from fiction. He is still at a developmental stage which cannot distinguish fantasy from reality or recognise the sovereign status of others. This is no mere lack of empathy but determined resistance to the kind of conscience which, unfortunately, attends the very maturity and becoming-real he otherwise desires. Jiminy Cricket spends most of the story getting battered and bruised.

When Trump is trolled as Diaper Donny, the implications of such mockery have yet to be elucidated. If he were to be given a polygraph test during one of his forays from the truth he would pass with flying colours. He doesn’t lie, he just can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. He’s still at the developmental stage where if he says it then it’s so, which is the original meaning of ‘abracadabra’, from the Aramaic, ‘I create as I speak.’ The threshold of wishing-not-making-it-so has yet to be crossed. He’s not immoral but pre-moral. The lies are not ‘post truth’. They are pre-truth.

The problem with becoming a real boy is that it’s attended by both conscience and consequence, by the deflating limitation of the rule of law, by grief laden loss of entitlement and specialness. He and his sycophants fight as hard as they do because a great deal more than position and power are at stake. They might also lose preferred identity. The choice is not a happy one, the belly of the whale or the prospect of being turned into a donkey.

Pinocchio’s redemption is to be able to connect to someone/something greater than his isolated and encapsulated self. In the belly of the whale he discovers Geppetto, his creator, whom he saves and in the process ‘dies’ to his old self by being brave and unselfish. The transformation of narcissism tends to be this dramatic, involving a death and rebirth motif presided over by some kind of spiritual insight/illumination.

This is made difficult for us all if those in our orbit have a vested interest in promoting the grandiosity of narcissism’s false self. From this point of view the problem is not the narcissist themselves but their enablers. And why, you might ask, does anyone support the strutting of the wooden despot? Because it relieves everyone else of the burden for their own growth. The narcissist is both the saviour and the problem child all rolled into one, someone upon whom both our potential and the shadow can be projected which means we need not take responsibility for either.

The easy life, the American Dream, entails having someone at the helm who is a mix of god and devil. When the world dances in the streets at Trump’s passing, which is not too far away, they will already have forgotten how much he has been necessary to our collective equanimity. The same senate who murdered Julius Caesar for wanting to be an Emperor happily ratified Octavian to that same position only a few years later.

Starving Mathias.

There was once a poor man who was so hungry everyone called him Starving Mathias. His sole possession was a measly length of rope, so he decided to go into the woods and hang himself with it. As he wandered between the trees looking for a suitable branch he came across the Devil coming the other way.

‘Hello Starving Mathias, what are you doing here?’

Now, Starving Mathias may have been depressed but that’s not to say he wasn’t scared or angry, ‘Why, I’ve come into these woods to find incense to smoke you out of Hell! he replied, giving the Devil his fiercest look. The Devil dropped to his knees and begged Starving Mathias to spare him, offering him whatever he might ask for if only he refrained from such a dire threat.

‘Well,’ said Starving Mathias after some thought, ‘two hundred pounds of gold should do it.’ The Devil instantly and gratefully produced two hundred pounds of gold in a large, hefty sack which Starving Mathias hoisted onto his back and carried home.

The Devil also went home, quaking with fear, and told all the other devils about his terrifying encounter with Starving Mathias who had threatened to smoke them all out of Hell. The other devils were deeply troubled by this, not to mention the huge sum of two hundred pounds of gold, which they all agreed was far too much. They resolved to get it back somehow and spent considerable time scratching their chins, wondering how to go about it.

Eventually one of them, a great barrel chested demon, had the bright idea that they could just ask for it to be returned. The others heartily agreed and so the barrel chested demon roared up to the world and found Starving Mathias in his garden at the picnic table just about to tuck into a feast of suckling pig smothered in dauphinoise potatoes with a dip of creme fraiche and spring onions.

‘See here Starving Mathias,’ he said, trying to sound as gruff as he could, ‘we, er, we think that two hundred pounds of gold is way too much.’ He placed hairy knuckled fists the size of badgers onto the table to look as tough as possible. ‘We, er, we’d like it back, the gold..if you would be so kind.’

‘No, said Starving Mathias between mouthfuls, ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’

‘Well!’ said the barrel chested demon, dropping his voice another octave, ‘well, in that case, er, in that case…. I challenge you… yes, that’s it, I challenge you to a fight!’ He did his best to draw himself up to his full height with some added flames and pink smoke for effect.

‘No, I’m not going to fight you,’ said Starving Mathias, gently dabbing his mouth with a napkin, ‘I would only throw you down and crush you,’ he yawned. ‘But if you really want a fight why not go pick on my hundred and eighty eight year old grandfather. He would be the right match for you..’ and so Starving Mathias showed the barrel chested demon a cave deep in the woods from which could be heard the sound of gentle snoring. In rushed the barrel chested demon only to find that his protagonist was rather unhappy about being woken from his hibernation so early in the Spring and promptly crushed the poor demon’s bones in a mighty bear hug before cutting him to pieces with steak knife claws.

The barrel chested demon, or what was left of him, fled back to Hell blubbing pitifully. The other Devils muttered amongst themselves, agreeing this should not stand. They had rights after all. More importantly, the two hundred pounds of gold was way too much. Eventually a sleek and athletic looking devil volunteered to take Starving Mathias on. He found him just polishing off some stuffed peacock drizzled with hawks head relish served with petite pois and steamed purple sprouting. ‘See here Starving Mathias, two hundred pounds of gold is way too much….. but to be fair I will challenge you to a race. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

‘No, I’m not going to race you, said Starving Mathias, ‘ I would only run so fast as to knock down the walls of Hell… Why don’t you take on my son, John, who would be a much better match for someone as slow as you’. So Starving Mathias took the athletic looking devil into the woods, knowing exactly where to find a sleeping rabbit having his midday nap. He kicked the bush under which the rabbit lay and it shot off down a steep gully. The devil tried to follow but the gully was full of terribly sharp stones washed down by recent rains which cut his poor feet to ribbons. ‘Who knew your son John could run so fast,’ he whimpered, or that stones could be so sharp..’ and so he limped all the way back to Hell, which is much further away than you might imagine.

The other devils were mightly put out by all this. Something had to be done. Eventually the strongest of them got up, declaring he would return the gold. He was huge and strode up to the world, shaking the earth with every step. He found Starving Mathias in his garden just finishing off some medium rare venison steak cooked in white wine and dijon mustard. ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ growled the strongest devil, trying, but failing, not to step on the flower beds with his enormous mutton feet, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. ‘I challenge you to a contest of raw power. See that cart horse yonder? We’ll take turns to see who can carry it around the yard the most number of times. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

Starving Mathias flossed his teeth a bit and thought about the challenge. He was somewhat concerned because he hadn’t quite built up his strength yet… He pondered and reflected and pondered some more…. ‘all right, he said, ‘you first.’ So the strongest devil picked up the carthorse and strode around the yard, circling it seven times. Eventually, he dropped the horse, utterly exhausted, lying where he had fallen.

‘Well done!’ exclaimed starving Mathias, ‘but I will make the challenge for myself harder still by picking up the cart horse between my legs,’ and he leapt onto the horse and rode it round and round the yard carefully trampling the strongest devil every time he went around. ‘There! I went around eleven times carrying the horse between my legs! I win!’ And so the Devil, disoriented and crushed, returned to Hell utterly defeated.

The other devils were outraged. There was even some suggestion touted from the back that a committee should be formed to return the gold. Eventually, the meanest and nastiest devil stood up saying that he would succeed where the others had failed and slid up to the world where Starving Mathias had just finished a bowl of shiitake mushroom and asparagus soup seasoned with turmeric and coriander.’ ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ hissed the scariest devil, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. I challenge you to a wager, we’ll see who is the scariest. Winner takes all.’

‘Meh, okay,’ said Starving Mathias, ‘you first.’

‘Er, what if we make you drink poisoned ink?’

‘I’ll drink it if I have to…’

‘Er, what about if we strap you into a harness of stinging nettles and make you plough a field of burning coals?’

‘I’ll endure it if I must..’

‘What about, er, putting you in a vat and boiling you in molten lead…?’

‘Enough of this bullshit!’ cried Starving Mathias, ‘now I am going to scare you!’ and he called his wife to come out of the cottage. ‘Mildred!’

Midred emerged, rolling pin in hand, as fierce and determined as she was large and strong. She grabbed the scariest Devil with one meaty paw and began to beat him with the rolling pin, belabouring him meantime with the world’s sharpest tongue while she did so..

‘Why you greedy, degenerate, shiftless cockwomble of a devil!’ she yelled, beating his legs. ‘You good for nothing, woe begotten, harebrained oxygen thief!’ beating his rump. ‘ You hopeless, vagrant scrimshanker!’ beating his shoulders. ‘You worthless muckspouting mumble crusted loitersack!’ bashing his head. ‘Poltroon, saddle goose, ninny hammer.’

The scariest devil was so challenged in his preferred identity as a scurrilous and unsavoury degenerate, a putrid and reprehensible miscreant, that he shed not only his shirt but his skin as well and fled all the way back to hell. “Let starving Mathias keep the fucking gold! He is way more devil than all of us put together’. And so it was the Mathias and Mildred lived out their days feasting on whatever their hearts desired, taking it in turns to cook up delicious delicacies for one another and laughing their heads off at all the rude things to call devils.

Our story begins with Starving Mathias in despair. His poverty and his hunger are symbolic of what it might feel like to get ‘to the end of one’s rope’. It is the situation where the preferred identity of what Winnicott would call ‘the false self’ is no longer sustainable. The more alluring persona which you might like to present to the world just feels dry and hollow and no longer worth the candle. Starving Mathias has hit ‘rock bottom’. This is a state of mind often described as existential crisis. To live is not enough. There has to be meaning and purpose, whilst painfully acknowledging one cannot provide this for oneself. Moreover, Mathias keenly feels his inadequacies, his guilt, his failure and his helplessness.

A person’s independence is a stage on the path of individuation but is not its goal. Beyond independence lies inter-dependence, the realisation that we need not only one another but also ‘the spirit of the depths’ to quote Jung, a connection to the greater awareness embodied by whatever the divine is for you, in order to imbue ego-consciousness with real vitality. Giving up independence as an end in itself feels like a terrible blow, a kind of death, an humiliation, the renunciation of a once vaunted accomplishment. Nevertheless, this death of self-sufficiency has to be entered into if we are to make any spiritual progress.

‘A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become, who had they lived did most surely die… but when they died, vitality began.’ Emily Dickinson.

Another way of saying this is that transcendence happens via the inferior function, what is least developed in oneself, the stone that the builder refused. When we can accept and integrate what is most lowly in us then something wonderful happens. With the renunciation of a partial, jaundiced view which prefers only the syntonic propaganda of who-I-am, the ego as a warts-and-all experience then becomes sufficiently compendious to house a more fully fledged sense of self. Such a perspective is no longer afraid of its own devils and can therefore appropriate a goodly chunk of the spiritual gold which said devils keep to themselves for as long as we are at odds with them.

The Salmon Sweetheart.

A long, long time ago, way before you were born, way before machines, tarmac or income tax, there was a fisherman who used to paddle his wickerwork coracle out onto the lake where he lived at every full moon. On this particular night the moon was low and heavy, there was not a breath of wind and the coracle floated without effort into the night. After a while he set his line and waited, knees drawn up under his chin, wolfskin pulled down over his shoulders to ward off the cold. He waited and waited and waited. The coracle bobbed ever so gently on the still surface. His mind wandered…

All of a sudden the line snapped taught and the coracle tipped forward into the dark water. The fisherman quickly looped the line around one hand and braced his feet against the wicker as the small craft was pulled about. He tried to balance himself, leaning back so as not to have the coracle be swamped by surging motion, his heart now racing to the struggles of his hidden prey.

Just as it seemed the boat would be pulled under, a mighty Salmon burst out of the water towards him, arcing through the dark sky, moonlight glittering across its thousand silver scales as it slammed into his body. He tried to get a hold of it. Just for a moment he managed to grab it by the gills and the tail, just long enough to look into its yellow eye, just long enough to see its yawning mouth, just long enough to hear it whisper sweetly, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman dropped the salmon back into the water as though it had bitten him. It slipped away and disappeared in an instant. He shook himself and yelled at the rippling wake by way of trying to assert he was somehow still in charge of events, ‘Are you mad? You are a fish! I am a man! Come back here …!’ But the salmon was gone.

The fisherman did the best he could to gather his wits. He told himself he must have imagined it all, or been bewitched perhaps. He set his line again by way of trying to organise his thoughts and soon recomposed himself. But not for long. Once more, just as the waters’ surface had regained their calm, the huge fish burst skywards, knocking the poor man clean off his feet and into the lake.

Though winded and suddenly freezing in the cold waters, he tried to grab at the fish, getting all tangled up together in the line which now seemed more like endless tresses of silver hair. With one hand he tried to hold her whilst clawing for the edge of the coracle with the other. The salmon wriggled against him, almost teasing him, her mouth gaping close to his ear, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman spluttered and choked, struggling for coherence, ‘I, you.. what? No!’ And so the fish took him down, line, rod, and man, down down into the inky waters, until his lungs felt as if they would explode… ‘and what about now my darling? Would you be my sweetheart now?’

He tried to fight her. He tried to swim for the surface. He tried to speak, life bubbling out through his beard and up through the swirling mass of hair and flailing limbs. As consciousness dimmed he felt vaguely aware that she had wrapped arms around him, drawing him down and down, ever deeper into the cool dark depths of the lake.

The moon gradually disappeared from view as they sank, though it was not entirely black as you might imagine. Eventually they reached the silty bottom, landing softly and with exquisite comfort in the ancient mud. Being dead didn’t seem so bad after all. She held him gently, caressing his face and nuzzling his neck. He put his hands on her waist and then around her, holding her to him. ‘ And now, darling man? Will you be my sweetheart now?’

He thought about it for a bit. Being dead seemed to make quite a difference to how he felt about everything. It seemed not such a bad idea after all. ‘Okay, I will,’ and with that she gathered him up and swam strongly along the bottom, gradually rising up and up until they reached the surface and the edge of the lake where they found themselves in a sandy sheltered cove. There they rested and made gentle love together till morning.

When the fisherman woke he found she had been busy and built them both a rather lovely cottage with a garden and out buildings. A table had been set in the garden with breakfast things and coffee brewed on a fire. Their first child cooed and burbled in his cot. As the fisherman ate the child grew and then there seemed to be another and then another. For an age they dedicated themselves to the lives of the children. Eventually seven sons all shot up like weeds, grew beards and left home one by one, leaving the old couple with hoar frost heads, bodies bent, and just as they came to their last…. there was a mighty jerk on the line and the fisherman woke with a start, the coracle rocking wildly in the water.

The fisherman cursed himself out loud for falling asleep, trying to cast the seemingly stupid dream from his mind as he struggled to regain control of the line. The coracle dipped dangerously in the water and he had to lean back all he could to prevent the craft from being swamped.

As he held on, bracing himself in the wickerwork, the images of his sleep swirled about inside him, insisting themselves, scoring into his memory and imagination. He struggled against them as though against some hated enemy, desperately trying to reassert himself. He needed to keep his small boat afloat, to land his catch and have something to show for his efforts by morning. Mouths depended upon him after all. There would be hunger and recriminations should he fail. So he held on with all his might when suddenly a great fish erupted from the dark waters and careened, flapping wildly, straight into his body. They both fell to the bottom of the boat where he struggled to hold onto his prey which now fixed him with it’s yellow eye as he held her close and whispered, ‘hello darling man, will you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman is seeking something. He’s not sure what. Something to feed himself, something to keep body and soul together. The concept of seeking is central to many spiritual traditions, though what it actually means is not so obvious. Is it simply a matter of casting out your line and hoping for the best? The contemporary Christian tradition of ‘seek and ye shall find,’ cast in your line and something will surely bite, is rather different from the original version. This was found in the Gnostic book of Thomas, recently discovered at Nag Hammadi, unadulterated by two thousand years of kings and pontiffs with axes to grind and populations to keep in line. In Thomas this line reads, ‘He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.. (para2)

Why will we be troubled and amazed? Perhaps the answer to this is best expressed by Rumi in the Sufi tradition, ‘ What you seek is seeking you.’ The divine is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. It is actively engaged with us, trying to draw our attention to a greater reality than that bound by ego consciousness. Sometimes this is by visiting upon us the most difficult and painful situations in order to bring about the new perspective.

On the entrance lintel to the Oracle at Delphi are carved the words, ‘Know thyself’. This had a rather different meaning to the ancients than it does for us in modern times. We tend to think of self knowledge as shadow integration, having a good grasp of the darker corners of the personality. Back in the day ‘mind’ or ‘self’ was equivalent with the entirety of the Psyche and so knowing oneself really implied having a relationship with the inner ‘Other’ which transcends ego awareness. ‘The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.’ (Jung p232 Red Book)

This understanding helps us to grasp the symbolic meaning of what is often referred to in the literature as ‘ego death’. The western tendency to think concretely has stopped more than a few in their quest for spiritual progress because they imagine their egos have to be eradicated in the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need healthy egos to withstand the impact of self-realisation since the experience of the self ‘is always a defeat for the ego’ (Jung Mysterium para 778)

When we become aware of the ‘Spirit of the Depths’ it challenges and reconfigures the constructed identity we spend so much time trying to maintain and stabilise. This leads to the humbling and even painful realisation of how superficial and one dimensional life has been thus far. A sacrifice of ego-as-centre-of-the-psyche has to be made. The death is not that of the ego per se but of its primacy in the psyche. The ego is no longer that around which everything revolves but is itself a satellite of something more fundamental. ‘The Spirit of the Depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.(Jung p230 the Red Book)

The ego is then compelled to realise it is not master of its own house, but a servant to a greater power. The ‘death’ is that of the illusion that the psyche is what I know of it. The birth is that of realising that we don’t know the half of it, in the face of which mystery we can only stand in awe and wonder.

‘The Spirit of the Depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.’ (ibid p234)

Once the fisherman can renounce wanting the Salmon on his own terms he is introduced to an experience of life’s purpose he could not previously imagine. His life becomes simple and dedicated to the child(ren). Of course, once in a while, he lapses back into what Kierkegaard would call ,’the despair of wanting to be oneself’, the fantasy that he is isolated and separate. Perhaps there is purpose in such despair, to be reminded once more that, ‘even the enlightened person remains what s/he is and is never more than their own limited ego before the One who dwells within, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses on all sides, fathomless as the abyss and vast as the sky.’ (Jung, Answer to Job.)