I thought I was in for an easy evening. My son was away at a festival, the neighbors were on holiday, no-one else for several miles in any direction. It was dry and warm. I decided to go and tuck myself into a little copse of trees way in back of the property, light a fire, crack a cold one and enjoy the gloaming.

As the fire began to crackle and blaze a figure emerged through the billowing smoke and into the copse tumbled the laird of the land. ‘Do you know what this place is?’ he demanded, careening straight on without waiting for an answer, ‘this place is sacred, I won’t see it desecrated!’

He clearly meant it so I thought it best to sit still and encourage the telling of his story. He began, asking whether or not I had noticed the pressing banks around the copse or wondered why this place remained unused when all about lay planted farm land.

I hadn’t.

The laird himself didn’t know the real story of the copse until mid life, despite all this land being in his family since living memory. All he knew was no-one went near the place. Then, one day, he called in a native diviner to help him look for water on the property. He was an old man renowned for his second sight who lived by himself on the edges of a nearby village. The laird thought to try in the copse and asked the diviner to have a look.

The old man walked carefully over to the site and stood looking on at the copse with its gnarled beech trees and protective mossy banks. His eyes glazed over. The divining rods hung limp in his hands. Tears began to run down his face.

‘This is a place of death,’ he said softly. ”When the Black Death came,’ he added, as though witnessing it himself, ‘the village was all but wiped out. Those who would die tomorrow came and buried their loved ones who’d died today. Here,’and he indicated the gently mounded copse, ‘they dug a great pit and put them in.”

As he turned to leave the old man muttered, ‘two crusaders in chain mail guard the dead.”

The laird finished his story and disappeared into the falling night. I was left with my fire, perched upon the mound, the dead piled beneath me and the crusaders a little way off talking quietly but earnestly to one another. I was tempted to run all the way home but something kept me there, some pressing urgency to remain in this dread spot.

Eventually I went over to the knights and sat with them to hear their conversation better. They were speaking of their fallen comrades and of their family who lay here, doing their level best to remember all of the obligations with which they had been charged by the departed so their memory could be appropriately honored.

At some point they looked up and inquired about my own obligations. I wanted to protest saying this had nothing to do with me but I knew it was a lie before the words were formed and so I fell silent and then began to weep for all those I had lost myself, at first quietly and then with anguished abandon.

‘Why must there be so much grief?’ I asked once the storm had passed.

‘To keep us all human’, they replied.

This week the leader of the free world, so hardened to grief that he can boast about crowd sizes and vilify his enemies between mass shooting funerals, endorsed a tweet naming him King of the Jews and then told incredulous reporters that he is ‘The Chosen One’.

Which goes to show how the refusal to feel and the doubling down of eternal invulnerability can have consequences for both sanity and the state of your soul way beyond considerations of political impropriety.

The only other person I know to make such a claim was my mate K_____ who ended his career as Lord of the Universe in a padded cell having been discovered stark naked and knee deep in confetti by his landlord with a box of matches in one hand and a jerry can of kerosene in the other.

At the same press conference on the White House lawn, the glorious leader conflated his august person with the state on several occasions. ‘I have the best economy…’ The last known leader to create a symbolic equation between himself and the nation was Hitler who famously remarked, ‘I am Germany.’ Before that there was Louis XIV, ‘L’etat c’est moi.’ I am the state. It ended badly for both of them.. and their nations.

Denial of feeling blighted the youth of all three of these men with disastrous consequences for those within reach, particularly minorities, though their influence ultimately spread to the character of the entire nation which led to a generalized malaise of spirit, a corruption of national integrity, immuring the souls of those it did not murder.

Voltaire describes Louis’ debilitating effect on the esprit de coeur of the nation in a way that could have been lifted from last weeks Washington Post if only it hadn’t been written nearly three centuries ago…

‘Flattery pleased him to such a degree that the coarsest was well-received, the basest with most relish. It was only in this way that anyone ever reached him. It was this that gave such power to his ministers through the constant opportunities that they had to adulate him. Suppleness, baseness, an admiring, cringing, and dependent air, above all, an air of nullity except through him, were the only means of pleasing him. Year by year the poison spread…’

This poison is essentially a loss of soul which comes about as a result of having to suppress feeling and relatedness which not only separates you from others but also from yourself. The reason for this is that our values are rooted in feeling without which they simply become a negotiable commodity entitled to flip flop which ever way the wind is blowing at the time.

This places the notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative feeling’ in a much broader context than the quasi morality of judging certain sets of feelings to be bad and wrong, feelings that you simply have to get over, or worse, let go. For every feeling denied, values are eroded, knowing how to think and act are impaired, gaps open up in the soul which have to be filled with toxic drama and adrenalin to hold oneself together. The need for enemies nags at sleep.

Another commentator on the psychology of Louis observed..

”Then came the desire for glory, hence the facility with which Louvois, the Secretary of State involved him in great wars and the ease with which the minister convinced him he was a greater captain than all his generals. He appropriated all with an admiring complacency in himself and believed he was really such as they depicted him. Hence his taste for reviews, which he pushed to such lengths that his enemies called him the “review king”; Lapham Quaterly

The man who stifles down his ‘negative feelings’ identifies himself with the state and, by way of compensation, believes he is divinely appointed. He must then go to war, not just for re-election or to keep the people in fear but to prevent his own utter collapse into psychosis. He goes mad to stay sane, which is a neat strategy, only, the nation gets dragged into the gutter in the process. Reflecting on whether Louis had made France and therefore himself great again after decades of catastrophic wars Voltaire offered this consideration,

”If greatness of soul consists in a love of pageantry, an ostentation of fastidious pomp, a prodigality of expense, an affectation of munificence, an insolence of ambition, and a haughty reserve of deportment, Louis certainly deserved the appellation of Great. Qualities which are really heroic we shall not find in the composition of his character. ‘

The notion that big boys don’t cry is not just a stupid macho trope. For the want of mourning on the mound of the dead, for want of the willingness to be at home in our own skins whatever we may be experiencing means becoming deadened ourselves. We may then never learn to walk a mile in another’s shoes without losing our own. Recourse to action is then limited to the destructive mix of equating oneself with the Gods married up with the compulsive need to lash out at the world.

Trump may fare better than Louis who died a hideous and agonizing death from diabetic gangrene. But what about the rest of us? Or does it take having nuclear codes in the hands of a man who actively needs to go to war for the sake of his rocky internal cohesion to get us in touch with our own gut feelings and the values they may then give rise to?

Once upon a time there was a wealthy and sophisticated man, Mark the Rich, who prided himself on his possessions and personal refinement. One night he had a dream God himself was coming to dinner, so he jumped up and had his servants prepare a great feast. Others he posted at the doors to prevent the poor and hungry from getting any. The people heard about the feast and arrived to beg alms but were chased away.

A bent old man was hurt in the starving, ragged press and collapsed to the floor. He was helped up by a kind woman who took him home and gave him food and shelter whilst the rich man continued to wait for God…

During the night she had a dream that a divine child was going to be born in the next village and that she should tell Mark the Rich. When she woke she went to his house and told him the dream. He went to the village and under the pretext of giving the child a step up in life took the boy home but on the way buried him in a snow drift and left him to die.

“Lie there and freeze; that’s the way to become master of Mark’s wealth!” but huntsmen came along soon after, found the boy and rescued him.

Years passed and one day Mark the Rich happened upon the divine child by chance whilst out hunting in the woods. He questioned him and learned his story, realizing what must have happened. He gave the boy a letter to take to his wife containing orders to kill the bearer. On the road the boy met a bent old man who introduced himself and asked the boy’s business. He showed him the sealed letter he was to deliver which the old man touched, magically changing the contents to a wedding celebration between him and the rich man’s only daughter.

Mark the Rich was determined to get rid of his new son-in-law and sent him to the distillery having ordered servants to throw him in the cauldron and drown him when he arrived. On the way the boy fell ill and could not go on. Impatient, Mark the Rich went to see what had happened but by that time it was dark, the servants in waiting mistook him for the younger man and tossed him in.

The impact of the Patriarchy on women needs little amplification from me. It’s impact upon men is not as well documented or discussed. Perhaps it seems self indulgent to think about, given the overwhelming calamities women have suffered ever since male gods decided to do without their feminine counterparts.

The ethos of entitlement and privilege enjoyed by that part of the male psyche personified by Mark the Rich is often enough to fool himself he can escape the splash back of persecution perpetrated against women and minorities over the centuries. Yet such a conviction can only be sustained by a split in the psyche which even slaves do not have to suffer.

This split is expressed culturally by the poetic antagonism between Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of monotheism’s progenitor Abraham, doomed to be at each other’s throats for the next four thousand years for the want of mamma’s wooden spoon. Yet the divide has implications for the individual psyche of modern men whatever his allegiances, since the personal shadow is bound to be thickened in direct proportion to the degree of ‘sophistication’ enjoyed by those sold on their own PR who would do well to bear in mind the origin of the word. It comes from the latin ‘sophisticatus’ meaning ‘tampered with’ and from which the word ‘sophist’ or ‘liar’ is also derived.

The sophisticated man is misrepresenting himself and doing so in a very dangerous way. Not only does he have to project his animal nature onto others, for which he then vilifies them, but also his creative spirit which then makes him feel robbed into the bargain by all those inferior folk who some how, despite his best efforts, seem to have everything.

”This creative content of the individual’s inner life acquires its negative status in socially standardized behavior which does not allow any individual unpredictability [or] creative insights [which are] taken as a direct threat to the stagnant social order.” Stanislava A. Bazikyan.

What this means is that we are bound to attribute our better angels to others as well as our devils because having one’s own moral compass is a betrayal of the herd’s collective norms. The seduction of knowing everything already easily prizes the harder yet more creative prospect of individual consciousness from the sticky paw of the aspirant who now trades individuation for being-sophisticated and favored-by-the-Gods.

‘The shadow does not consist of only morally reprehensible tendencies, but also expresses a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, reality based insights, creative impulses, etc.” C. G. Jung.

The consequences of this schism within the male psyche, symbolized by Mark the Rich, is far more serious than mere ignorance or bigotry. It constitutes the untethering of yourself from your own personal destiny and the renunciation of ever being a grown up. It is not only the ‘inferior’ aspects of oneself which are repressed and kept from the door but also the more noble, nurturing, generative aspects of masculinity which must be frozen off to qualify as ‘successful’ in what’s now perceived as a dog eat dog world.

This gives rise to a culture which prides itself on its mediocrity, which is happy to be dumbed down, which wants to be uninformed, and for which every contradiction is fake news. In the process the generative male spirit which cares about the legacy it leaves behind is silenced. The value placed on clean air and water for posterity is nipped in the bud.

If you google ‘traits of being successful’, you will find lists not incomparable with the DSM-5 definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.. It’s all about drive, ambition, self belief, self reliance, like being eternally twenty. There’s very little about connection, relatedness or investment in others. Its all first and only.

These greater qualities all seem to have been hived off and projected, either onto women who are then compelled into the role of with-holding harpies, or onto Nature which must then be ransacked for the treasure you just gave away, or onto the material world with all its must have goodies.

Advertisers have an intuitive sense of this and target men by appealing to these compulsions which are in fact rooted in the unconscious desire for wholeness. The depersonalisation and objectification of women contains a secret longing for far more than eternal sexual availability.

The desire to own more than you need derives from a similar attribution to the material world of your own deep spiritual value. This exerts a fascination over us from it’s place of exile, a fact which is easily exploited by those who sense you are as motivated by emptiness and the unconscious longing to be whole as you are by the desire to impress the ladies.

When we freeze off the divine child in ourselves for the sake of maintaining an impressive front built on the definitions of success passed down to us we are bound to fall foul of our own contrivances and instead of distilling spirit, get ourselves self-destructively broiled instead.

The solution is not a premature ‘getting in touch with the feminine’ (which is liable to swallow you up like a vat of 40% proof vodka) but to realize the extent of your own betrayal and incompleteness, the insufficiency of wealth and privilege, the lie of sophistication, the loneliness of waiting for God to come to dinner.

The myth that there is any such thing as a negative feeling is responsible for way more than the petty tyrannies of political correctness. The corresponding puritanical injunction to ‘let go’ of the past disregards the question of whether or not it will let go of you and assumes leverage in the psyche it just doesn’t have. Such a monotheism of consciousness is bound to create alternative facts and to speak with forked tongue, clamoring at the now highly circumscribed and polished persona as if it were the holy grail itself, a form of madness touted as salvation.

How does this happen?

Well, if you take a child away from its mother it copes by regressing into a space where separation cannot reach it, splitting itself off from the traumatic event. In the process it becomes divided against the world and against itself but at least the castle keep of the soul has not been over run and still shelters the scattered remnants of the abandoned child.

What is true for the individual is true for the collective. Ontology capitulates phylogeny as they say down the Saracen’s Head during philosopher’s hour. So if you rob humanity at large of it’s connection to the Great Mother, culture as a whole will regress and begin to live the institutionalized split reality of us and them, good and evil, the chosen and the damned. Over centuries social structures become imbued with racism and prejudice culminating in shit hole countries, border walls, mass shootings and misogyny.

Pundits deplore the orange leader as an anomaly, yet he is the most logical outcome of a culture itself plagued by image and ostentation, deeply split between conservation and consumption, between democratic ideals at home and imperialistic policies abroad.

If we imagine we are evolved whilst laying waste to our environment like a three year old shitting on its own doorstep then we must expect the virtuous suppression of common sense which might forbid the victims of massacres being comforted by those who orchestrate them, rock stars amid the carnage and horror.

What’s needed is not the euphemistic pushing away of ‘letting go’ which exacerbates division, but rather a ‘letting in’, letting in of at least some of the emptiness and disenchantment which underpins our collective hungering so that for the small price of our polished veneer some sense of underlying moral solidity may be had, even if its uncomfortable, even if its painful, even if it costs us the illusion of first and only.

Perhaps if we could refrain from labeling authentic if difficult feelings as ‘negative’ and having to split ourselves off from them, we might tolerate divisive leaders a little less and regain some of the healthy reality testing which can tell con-dolence from con-artist and comfort from snake oil.

The toppling of foul leaders, like charity, has to begin at home. If we wish to be rid of the horrible spectacle then we must take its oxygen, our own feelings of supremacy and entitlement, our own projections of inferiority onto others, our own holier than thou. All this letting go is denial. We must let in, communicate, empathize, find value in the other. Ultimately this is about remembering something we already know, something which now demands we acknowledge the shared wound of the un-mothered twisting its way through the judeo christian tradition for longer than memory. We’ll never be rid of tyrants or their cohorts until we can look at them and say, ‘of course..’

In ancient Lydia there lived an inspired weaver, Arachne, whose tapestries were so beautiful and lifelike that people came to see them from miles around. Arachne soon became as boastful as she was talented and let it be known she considered herself even more skilled than Athena herself. Athena got wind of this and showed up one day in the guise of an old woman. When Arachne repeated her claim Athena revealed herself and challenged the puffed up mortal to a contest.

Athena’s tapestry was a marvel but Arachne’s work was more miraculous still. Her compromising depictions of Zeus and Poseidon embarrassing themselves in their extra-marital shenanigins seemed quite alive. The goddess flew into a rage, ripped up Arachne’s work and magically turned her great pride into an equally inflated guilt so all consuming that Arachne despairs and kills herself. Athena realizes she’s over done it a bit and turns Arachne into a spider, forever after weaving her wondrous web.

The moral Ovid deduces is, ‘don’t think you are better than the gods’, though this seems like an interpretation mostly suited to ruling a pliant population. The fact is that Arachne won the competition. She was the better weaver. Her error was in failing to show gratitude to the gods for her gift which then leads to her mental imbalance, depression and suicide.

People mostly divvy up into those who believe in God and those who don’t. There are a few quibblers who feel they might have confused spiritual experience with indigestion but by far the most under represented are those who are in no doubt about God but still think that religion is a bad idea, mostly given the fact that international terrorism is rooted precisely in people having ‘special’ relationships with bad tempered deities.

Unfortunately, heinous acts against others for the temerity of being different are only the thin, visible, end of this wedge. Monotheism of any kind, including state sponsored atheism and the monotheism of consciousness it breeds, attacks its own people in greater though less obvious numbers.

One of the most insidious ways it does this is via the erosion of gratitude inevitable in any belief system rooted in the cosy entitlement which goes with being ‘chosen’.

The certainty of self this generates goes way beyond suddenly having great swathes of the planet pegged as second class citizens, children of lesser and laughable gods. It seems your neighbors at home haven’t quite got it right either. World Christian Encyclopedia (David A. Barrett; Oxford University Press, 1982) estimates almost 21,000 denominations of Christianity worldwide, each one convinced that some how they were the ones to get the details right.

Only those in my valley have any true knowledge of the world. It’s like claiming to be a gourmand without ever having strayed beyond the borders of your own allotment.

‘Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous’. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower

Back in the day, when there were a sensible number of gods, you might sacrifice at a different altar than your neighbor whilst feeling that you were still going about the same thing. Having a grumble at Hermes one day and offering Hera a gift the next allows life to be complex and contradictory. You are loved but not special and so when the gods show you their favor its cause for the kind of celebration and thankfullness that makes living worthwhile and puts your troubles behind you..

Arachne has to forgo this redemption for the arrogant conviction she is mistress of her own house. Even though she bests the goddess’ challenge, this cannot of itself give meaning to life. In fact she despairs entirely without the healing gratitude of valuing others and being given a gift that came free of conditions.

So, the belief that there is nothing new in the world and that you have a hotline to ultimate truth leads quickly to Promethean-like guilt and deadening attacks on the self.

Despite Arachne’s brilliance it all comes to nothing. The tapestry gets ripped up and her life destroyed, for want of a seemingly impossible ‘thankyou’.

Which makes you wonder about her relationship with her mother….

So I googled it, ‘Arachne’s mother was a common woman who is not named by Ovid’, which was disappointing for a moment, until you ask, ”how can specialness be renounced and symbiotic development take place with someone so marginalized as to be nameless?

The disenfranchisement of women ultimately leads, by torturous paths, to emotionally absent yet ravenous mothers who cannot help but incur destruction of creativity and loss of the will to live in their kids.

Arachne wonders why the fuck she should be grateful. For what? She’s had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps all her life and still managed to beat a goddess at her own game…

all of which is true..

Yet it is also true that adversity yields its own fruit. Perhaps Arachne’s great skill is not in spite of her past but because of it. Compelled to find the means to creatively transcend her suffering, she made tapestries of loss and injustice, symbolically weaving the threads of herself back together, making a great name for herself to compensate for a mother whose name none remember.

The naive spiritual doctrine of embracing good and eschewing evil is developmentally about four years old, when kids want to know who is the goody and who is the baddy in the movie you’re watching.

This does not mean masochistically inviting suffering into our lives. It nevertheless remains that adversity compels us to grow in ways that soft living may never produce. Who you have become is invariably by way of pain and adversity as well as nurture. If you look back on the toughest times in your life they are usually the ones in which you grew most.

Sometimes people say about therapy, ‘oh, what’s the point? You can’t change your past..’ which is true, though you can change your relationship with it which makes redemption and healing possible. This paradoxical process requires gratitude, not as a way of denying or minimizing suffering, but in so far as adversity breaks the kernel of our understanding, provides new frames of reference, questions values you might have swallowed whole, and throws you back on as yet unmanifest self.

The Gods, despite their weighty preoccupations, are not averse to a little domestic moonlighting…..

Eris, the Goddess of Strife, also called Discordia, is particularly easy to persuade to the table. But what is it that catches her attention sufficiently for it to feel like an invitation to join the party?

The clue is at the foot of the painting…

Two small children are playing the grand game of saving-what-you-love-most-about-dinner on the side of the plate until last; so the final mouthful is the most delicious. Mother puts a stop to all this nonsense by confiscating the treasured morsels. So the children begin to leave what they suddenly dislike about dinner on the side of their plate and have that confiscated instead..

The kids come out feeling on top and yet something really horrible is happening. Mother’s shaming is the insidious yet soul destroying expression of envy at their autonomous game, their shared delight. The shaming is dressed up as ‘discipline’ but actually says…How dare you have any imagination? Who are you to exercise any jurisdiction over your plate? You shall not savor, nor anticipate the delicious morsel.

Moreover, you are under scrutiny. Whatever you put in your mouth from one spoonful to the next will have penetrating and intrusive attention. All of which begins to make you feel that even though the food travels from pan to plate it never quite becomes yours. And if the food is not quite yours what about your place at the table?

This is all way too much to consider at the time. You mustn’t make sense of it or use your mind. It has to be packed away by the compensatory glee of beating Mother at her own game, having agreed to trade in delight for deception. You are left with the message, do not win, do not feast on the delicious morsel. Play the game of life but don’t get up on your hind legs and try to be a part of it.

In the process the delicious morsel is lost. In fact, to continue to identify with a mother who-knows-what’s-best the child must excise, confiscate and bin the shameful treasure wherever she finds it.

Children then grow up with the split reality of eat but don’t enjoy and win but don’t play. Their sense of self splits to accommodate all this. Different aspects of the self must forgo knowledge of one another. The jungle pathways between them become overgrown in order to remain unconflicted.

This is a problem. It means that your strategy for self preservation is to stem inner dialogue and renounce autonomy. What to do? The psyche attempts to cover it’s bets with a twofold cunning plan. Firstly, the endless repetition of ordinary pleasures denied, banging at the gate so that one day they can perhaps become conscious, like seeds in hope of fertile soil.

Secondly, the original feelings, though disconnected from their context, still serve somewhat to glue the fragments of self together whilst railroading the voice of authentic experience,..

”resorting to behaviors which evoke strong affects which can be identified with, thereby maintaining a sense of self.” Woods and Woods.

This means practicing the art of creating chaos out of whatever you can find to hand and upping the ante at every opportunity.

”Eris is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven.” Homer.

Curiously 20thC chaos theory echoes the metaphor with what is called ‘the butterfly effect’..

”Tiny errors in the measurement of the current weather do not stay tiny, but relentlessly increase in size each time they are fed back into the computer until they completely swamp predictions”. J Borwein.

Eris makes mountains out of mole hills.

This means life has to be lived with roller coaster intensity in order to be lived at all. Without the secure happiness of a pleasurable connection to the delicious morsel, you have to have wild rides, splintered experience and conflict instead.

Freud said..

”People tend to lose their neuroses in times of war”.

Conflict will evoke intense feelings to identify with as a matter of immediate survival. Nothing resolves separation anxiety better than sharing a trench with someone. Your feud with your neighbor will be eclipsed by something even more guaranteed to focus attention. Self preservation infers a self to preserve. Which means, unfortunately, that conflict may become necessary for the shamed child to feel alive.

In order for children to grow there has to be some ‘temenos’ or sacred space within which there can be the safe feeling of symbiotic attachment, where the enjoyment of imagination can be un-selfconsciously shared and made real, where the soul is refreshed and temporarily protected from the chaos beyond the enclosure.

This space..

”reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.” T Moore.

In any such temenos there has to be the equivalent of a garden gate which both opens and closes, allowing traffic back and forth. If the gate is compromised or subject to shaming (here’s the key but you’re not entitled to it) then the child has to find her way over the hedge to get in and out.

This is bound to be a bit tricky…. though the puncture wounds endured in the process can become a way of knowing oneself in place of play and imagination, a rather specialized kind of survival strategy.

Greek philosopher Epicurus said that everyday pleasure is the greatest value. His was the spirituality of ordinary life. He called it ‘hedonism’, which originally meant to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one’s desires. Unfortunately, his ideas have suffered the same fate as the child whose simple joys got usurped by the substitute intensity of deception and revenge. 

For Epicurus, the most pleasant life is one where you can achieve an inner tranquility (ataraxia) by finding meaning in simple things, the delicious morsel of ordinary pleasure.

Hedonism today has come to mean the proxy pursuit of Intensity whose unconscious intention it is to plug the very gap where simple pleasures used to be. For the want of depth and sacredness in everyday life, moderate traffic through the garden gate, you are compelled to try and approximate it by going through the garden hedge instead.

In lieu of simple shared pleasures, playful imagination and the enchanted encounter of yours and mine, you have the intensity of being stretched between split realities, fending off blackthorn and bramble, like the drunk who drinks to drown the shame of being a drunk, the addict who lurches from hell to heaven and back again. The spouses whose make up sex needs a vicious fight to kick off with. So long as it’s intense the content doesn’t seem to matter too much, anything to relieve the anxiety of living in a divided world.

Being swung from one extreme to another by the need for opposition is home territory for Eris and her brother Ares, Greek God of War, who don’t really care whether they win their battles or not, so long as some dust is being raised at the time.

Ares relationship with his father, Zeus, was rooted in shame. When he comes home wounded from the Trojan war…..

Zeus, who gathers the clouds, spoke to him:
“Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus.

But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous
long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.”^[22]Homer’s Iliad.

The only redeeming thing about you is that you are my product. You do not belong to yourself. Nor do I love you for your own sake. We have no gated temenos. The threshold of simple shared pleasures that bind a soul to itself will never be yours.

Ares deteriorates, begins to hang out with some unsavory types. He’s difficult enough to be around on his own, but his borderline crew read like a check list from DSM-5 .

Besides Eris (Discord), impairment of interpersonal functioning, there is Deimos (Fear) with his unstable self image; Phobos, (Panic) with his frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment; Famine, chronic feelings of emptiness; and finally, Oblivion, poor impulse control.

This fractured crew symbolize the dissociative tendencies of autonomous defenses in the psyche when faced with parental shaming.

One thing you can be sure of…..

between them they will make short work of the delicious morsel.

It might seem like a bad idea to keep such company. There’s so much suffering involved and no sustenance to be had. But nobody said defense contractors have to be pretty, they just have to do their job, fending off the resurgent feelings of humiliation that surface with every bid for autonomy.

Such a life makes you resourceful, as Paris found out to his cost when Eris turns up to a wedding feast uninvited with a golden apple labelled ‘for the fairest’, compelling Paris to decide which one of three goddesses it should go to and hence what values he stood for.

”Borderlines are extraordinarily persistent and tenacious..” Woods and Woods.

So, all is not lost. There is more to the Eris/Ares gang than meets the eye. If they can be honored for the role they play in defense of the realm, despite the carnage left in their wake, then they begin to demonstrate different aspects of themselves. Hesiod says of Eris, once she’s been put in a better mood…,

‘‘She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbor vies with his neighbor. This Strife is wholesome for men.” Hesiod

Strife is also striving, making things happen, putting your shoulder to the wheel, doing what you must, gladly. Eris can impel soul searching and break molds like no other. She turns up on page one of many an heroic journey.

”I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.” Principia Discordia

Appreciating why you might need to lurch from one crisis to another or sabotage intimacy at every turn is a form of compassion for oneself which can change the way Eris operates. When the feelings of being intruded upon can be anchored back to the circumstances that spawned them, shaming attacks demanding capitulation of autonomy, then Eris will manifest some mysterious morsels of her own..

‘‘the delicious contradiction – with orderly effects emerging out of turbulent and chaotic causes. J Borwein.

Below, a martial Cecilia Bartoli, gives voice to Eris’ redemption as an advocate for the shamed child and relief from unconscious tempests.