dante – Andy White Blog

The Juniper Tree.

A brief study of evil.

Once upon a time there was a young woman who bore a son. She died during childbirth and was buried according to her wishes beneath the Juniper tree in the garden. After some time the boy’s father married again and had a daughter by this new wife, a harsh and moody woman who always found a reason outside herself to explain her ill temper. It seemed to her that her new son always stood in her way, both to her husband’s affections and to her daughter’s legacy. The ‘evil one’ filled her mind with this until she hated the boy, the poor child having to live in continual terror and unable to find any peace.

One day her daughter asked her if she might have an apple from the chest of drawers. As she was helping herself she asked if her older brother might also have one when he returned from school. The woman stiffened, and, as if the devil had entered into her, she snatched back the apple and told her daughter sharply that she had to wait for the boy’s return. When the boy got back from school the same devil made his step mother ask him with unusual sweetness if he would like an apple. Then it seemed as if she was forced to say, ‘come with me..’ and when he began to help himself from the chest of drawers the devil prompted her once more and she slammed the lid shut with such force his head rolled off.

Then she was overwhelmed with terror, ‘if I could but make them think it was not done by me,..’ She propped him up at the table and put the poor head back on its slender shoulders with a handkerchief wrapped around his neck to conceal the awful wound. She then put the apple in his open hand and went fussing about her business. When the daughter came in asking for her apple now her brother had returned from school she said, ‘of course, you may have his apple and if he does not give it to you, box his ears.’ When the young girl asked her brother for his apple and he failed to respond she boxed his ears and of course the head rolled off to the hysterical screaming of the terrified girl.

‘What have you done?’ scolded the mother, ‘come we must hide your crime and make him into black pudding.’ So they chopped him up and made him into black pudding, the girl crying terribly all the while. When the father came home they served him the black pudding and he ate up the whole lot. Beneath the table, the traumatised girl gathered up her brother’s bones, wrapped them in a handkerchief and went and lay under the Juniper tree weeping tears of blood.

Then she fell asleep and when she woke the handkerchief of bones had gone. At the top of the tree she saw a beautiful bird which sang the most incredible song,

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’

The bird flew off to the nearby mill and sang his song once more…

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.

The millers were amazed and asked him to sing once more to which he agreed but only at the price of the millstone which he then carried through the air with ease back to his parents house where he sang once more..

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.

The wicked mother rushed out with a broom to shoo him away but when she appeared he dropped the millstone upon her head and killed her outright. When father and daughter went out to discover the source of the commotion the young boy stood before them whole once more.

What is evil? Is there a line to be drawn between bad and mad? How can you tell the difference? And how do you work with it?

Such questions are made more difficult by the further consideration of whether evil is about acts or whether it is about intentions. Not to mention that evil often masquerades as good, ‘I’m just being honest….’ St Augustine was once asked how to be sure of what you are dealing with given the propensity of evil to camouflage itself in virtuous clothing, ‘by the taste in the back of your mouth.’ he replied. Your body will tell you.

That being said, what is evil? The church has a variety of responses, none of which seem entirely satisfactory anymore. Augustine, despite his visceral response, seems to shy away from the problem by calling evil the ‘absence of the good’, a concept central to his doctrine of the ‘Privatio Boni’, a theological feint which prefers not to give the problem of evil too much attention, nor the devil too much adversarial power. The Protestants don’t do much better in so far as evil is defined as defiance of god’s will, as if anyone could know what that might be and not withstanding the inflation presupposing it were even possible.

The Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers don’t bring much in addition to the table. Socrates and Plotinus both echo notions of ignorance and privation of good whilst Plato and Aristotle prefer the argument of failures of character or reason, elaborate forms of lack.

Even Nietzsche, whom you might think would have something meaty to say demures, reducing evil to a mere envious value judgement of the have-nots. He argues that the weak, resentful, or oppressed redefine the natural expressions of strength, power, and vitality as evil in order to morally condemn their superiors and elevate their own traits (like humility and obedience) as ‘good.’

For Schopenhauer, evil is a real feature of existence but only in so far as it is rooted in the blind, insatiable “will-to-live” that drives all beings. He argues that because every individual expression of the will strives at the expense of others, life is inherently marked by conflict, suffering, and cruelty. The only palliative is the emergence of compassion (Mitleid), which restrains the will’s harmful tendencies.

One way or another evil is treated as though it were ‘nothing but’. It seems to fall to Jung to break ranks with this dangerous mitigation, which you cannot help but think has actually given rise to the contemporary evils we are faced with, after all, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.'(Baudelaire)

An exception to this rule is the writing of 13th C. poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy might have had him burned at the stake if he had not already been exiled. His contrasting descriptions of Hell and Purgatory are telling instruction as to the nature of evil because the two realms are remarkably similar with one crucial difference, those trapped in Hell are determined in their self-righteousness. Their evil is depicted as a definite ‘something’, perhaps not so much a set of actions or behaviours as the set of unquestionable values which gave rise to them. In fact, the passage from one realm to the other is called the Adamant Gate, a threshold upon which intransigent conviction has to be renounced.

Jung’s approach to evil made him equally unpopular in certain quarters because he, like Dante, is unequivocal in his assertion that evil is a definite something. It behaves like a real, active force in the psyche. Treating it as “nothing but” leads to denial and projection. Historically, this matters because if a culture insists it is aligned with pure good it becomes blind to its own shadow. Such blindness allows destructive tendencies to grow unchecked and to appear ‘out there’ as enemies, heretics, presidents etc.

Jung’s thinking here is that what once supported life can, when it becomes outdated, turn into an obstacle and become harmful or destructive. ‘I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, how your goodness became brutality; your love became hate… (The Red Book)

The idea that everything out-dated becomes evil is a compression of three Jungian ideas:

Psychological forms have a lifespan
When they outlive their usefulness, they become rigid
Rigidity turns life-supporting structures into destructive ones

In other words what once served life, when it becomes fixed and outdated, tends to turn into its opposite. Something can be genuinely good in one stage but when it outlives its role, it blocks further development and becomes potentially destructive. When we are little we have definite ideas about who we are, all of which are largely commensurate with one another. As we grow and identity becomes more complex we are faced with the developmental task of containing contradictions and anomalies. I am both good and bad, loving and hating.

If such complexities cannot be entered into they are either repressed and find expression without the benefit of conscious mediation or they are projected onto others where they are no longer able to be sublimated or transmuted. The good then turns into its opposite because it refuses its opposite. So, development requires a kind of betrayal of the old good in order to inhabit a more compendious sense of self.

The opposite of evil is not good, it is growth. What this means is that even the good can become evil if good, as an identity, cannot be renounced. This is why Christianity is in such a pickle and why the halls of both political and religious institutions are replete with crucifix bearing zealots protecting paedophiles.

The mother in our story cannot grow into the realisation that she is not simply ‘good’. She cannot entertain the fantasy that she also harbours ill intent towards her step son. It seems that some external force makes her do bad things for which she has no responsibility or remorse. She understands intellectually what she has done but is limited to the self interest of ‘what if I am caught?’ Her need to preserve her ‘good’ name, her sense of self as a ‘good’ person then means she must sacrifice the very daughter whose station she hoped to elevate by killing the boy.

It is the very prejudice of goodness, ‘I could not say or do such a wicked thing because I’m not that kind of person’, which constitutes a kind of cancer of the soul and unleashes the disaster. Whatever we choose as our definition of evil has this as its precondition, denial, the now autonomous impulse being cast down into the underworld where it is free to grow horns and a tail.

The fact that the boy is reconstituted and returns to hound his step mother to death feels like an afterthought and is missing from earlier versions of the story whose primary message seems to be that without growing out of naive conceptions of oneself, destruction is bound to follow. The best defence against evil is to keep it close to you, to recognise your own capacity for hate and envy, to have the humility to recognise primitive stirrings and vengeful impulses such that they can then be contained, so as not to be let loose upon the world, or upon your loved ones.

I like M Scott Peck’s definition of evil from his chilling masterpiece, ‘People of the Lie’, “Evil is the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid spiritual growth.” In other words, evil is the means by which efforts are made to maintain the status quo and, ironically, to keep oneself small. The alternative is indeed difficult, involving any number of inner deaths, and having to hold the tension between opposites such that contradiction can be re-forged as paradox. An alchemical saying, devoted to growth and transformation, captures this best, ‘a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil’. I once asked Chuck Schwartz, who was an internationally recognised ceramicist as well as a training analyst with IGAP how he dealt with the desire for fame and riches. ‘I tip my hat to it’, came the reply.

The Devil’s Sooty Brother.

A decommissioned soldier down to his last crust happens upon a dark wood. Unable to find work or food he throws himself on the mercy of the forest and wanders in. Suddenly a strange little man is stood before him. He promises him wealth and riches if only the soldier will come down to Hell and serve him seven years. In addition, as with the story of ‘Bearskin’, the soldier may not wash or cut his hair and nails as he goes about his duties.

The soldier agrees and the Devil takes him down, down, to the kitchens of the Underworld where he must tend giant steaming cauldrons bubbling with hell broth and feed the furnaces burning white hot beneath them. The Devil further admonishes him that under no circumstances may he peek in the cauldrons on pain of something only the Devil could dream up and so the soldier sets cheerfully to work.

After a long while of dutiful labor, dragging about great stumps to throw into the furnaces, sweeping up the twigs and bark chips behind the door just as the Devil had shown him, he became curious about what might be in the smallest of the cauldrons. One day when the Devil was out he set up a ladder against it and climbed up for a peek. There he found his old corporal looking pensive in the bubbling stew.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw some extra big logs onto the fire.

After a much longer time of exemplary service the soldier became curious about what might be in the second larger cauldron, a great metal vat suspended from massive beams. He shimmied adeptly up the side of the cauldron and had a look inside. There was his former ensign with just his head sticking out.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.

The old soldier continued to work at his duties long and hard. He tended the flames and swept the floor every day, careful to put the sweepings behind the door as he had been told. Meantime his hair became long and matted.. His beard had grown to the floor and his nails stuck out like claws.

Finally, his curiosity about the third and largest of the cauldrons, an infernally wrought ark mounted upon a tripod of fossilized trees and fed with whole saplings, got the better of him. So he clambered up and there, with just his nose sticking out of the broth, was his old General.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to feed the greatest furnace with some gnarly stumps he had been saving for a special occasion.

By this time the old soldier has become unrecognizable. Layer upon layer of ash and soot is mashed into hair become mane and his beard has to be knotted to keep it out of the flames. One day the Devil looks in to see how he’s doing and lets him know his time is up and that he can go home now.

‘How did you get on?’ asked the Devil.

‘Oh quite well,’ he replied, ‘I did as you asked….

‘Ah, but you did peek in the cauldrons didn’t you, matey?’ said the Devil with gritted teeth. ‘I should bring down all kinds of unspeakable suffering upon you but because you’ve performed your duties so well and kept the fires so wonderfully bright, he added cheerily,’ I will let you off. Here are your wages…’ and he hands the soldier a satchel full of sweepings from behind the door. ‘When people ask you who you are you can tell them, ‘I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my King as well.”

Pleased to have gotten away without wetting himself but peeved at his meager wages the soldier sets off for home. He decides to dump the satchel before too long only to discover that it is now full of gold…

The first motif in the story, the disbanded soldier without prospects, is the ‘all revved up with nowhere to go’ experience of the personality which has fought its battles and become accomplished but has started to ask, ‘what for? To what end and purpose? Who am I besides the roles I’ve been given? What lies beneath the surface?’

‘‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death:” Dante’s Inferno.

In his diary Tolstoy writes of this experience,’ at first it was moments of perplexity and arrest of life as though I did not know what to do or how to live.. expressed by the question, ‘what is it for?’

Such a state of mind is bound to evoke a response from the Unconscious personified by the mercurial ‘little man’, who we could also call Shiva, Loki, or Hades. This encounter prefigures a descent into the Underworld. In ordinary life this is often experienced as some form of crisis, a failed marriage, the death of a loved one, a bout of inexplicable depression, the development of symptoms.

This descent, like the descent of Innana from Sumerian mythology, who had to relinquish a garment at every one of seven gates leading down to her dark sister, Erishkigal, involves the difficult process of boiling consciousness down to its essential elements, symbolized by the sulphurous steaming cauldrons and their grizzly contents. Sulphur is the element of transformation. Its the rotten egg smell of decomposition, of one thing becoming another.

The soldier must tend these cauldrons with their respective men inside just as the alchemist tends the fires beneath his alembic vessel,

‘a kind of uterus from which the filius philosophorum, is to be born.’ C G Jung

In the smallest kettle we find the corporal, a man of low rank who nevertheless had power over our soldier in his former life. A corporal is forever at your shoulder, micro-managing life with a bunch of directives not unlike the introjections of childhood which may be designed to make life work more smoothly, yet can become values designed to keep you in line at the expense of your individuality. You can only transform what belongs to you. The ‘not-me’ of other people’s opinions and convictions have to be separated out from what I think and feel, like meat from the bone.

People sometimes lament,’ oh, you can’t change the past,’ as though working on oneself were hopeless because the past is carved in stone. In fact, what it often boils down to is not the facts of the past but our relationship with them. Do you have them or do they have you?

The corporal used to have the soldier much as blind adherence to unquestioned authority ‘has’ the personality when it is unconsciously identified with something which runs it from within, something which you’ve swallowed down without noticing so that life can be lived without reflection. The corporal, like the inner critic, can make your life hell. He has to be boiled and boiled so what’s useful and constructive can be separated out from what is oppressive and life denying, so that internalized values can become the possession of the personality rather than it’s master.

In the next cauldron, which requires a great deal more emotional heat, we find the ensign, a man of higher rank who commands a squad, a varied, integrated personality with an organized structure capable of effective and responsible action…

..which is all very well, but its all still happening in the barrack room of the personality. Not only does the ego need to be formed it needs a context and so regardless of its contents and whether they get along or not so too is there the need to disidentify from it, to experience the personality, whatever it is, as something you have rather than something you are, to have a vantage point, a superordinate perspective au dessus de la mellee, above all the activity.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.

The problem with such emancipation is that it invariably gets inflated along the way. Having chucked off the ‘not-me’ introjects of childhood and achieved the heroic crafting of a well oiled unit , task oriented and adapted to reality, the hero is bound to over reach himself, having forgotten the ‘not-me’ within his own collective psyche, sweating out in the third giant cauldron.

Inside this mighty vessel he finds the General, a collective figure with whom he is inflated and therefor still possessed by, much as he might tout his freedom from more earthly, barrack room constraints.

The third cauldron requires whole trees in its furnace, so great is the energy needed to develop a relationship with the collective psyche without being swamped by it.

I dreamed an alien queen was coming to earth and I had to prepare an environment for her that was nitrogen rather than oxygen based. She arrives, I dare not look at her… ”Humm, very good, now why should I keep you alive? she purrs. ‘Er, to be of continued service to your majesty…’

and so you stoke the great fires till sweat binds grime to skin in testament to vigil over the flames whilst Self is gradually brewed in the largest of the cauldrons and alchemical gold spun from floor sweepings.

The Devil’s role in all this is initiatory, he shows the soldier in the door and gives him his duties. This somewhat relativizes what we have come to consider to be evil. It means that the bad things which happen also help you to grow into the person you are to become.

“The manner of [our] growth is by abrupt occurrences, crises, surprising events, and even mortifying accidents. Everything is forever going wrong; and yet, that is precisely the circumstance by which the miraculous development comes to pass.” H. Zimmer.

So the Devil gets consciousness evolving. At the end of the process he lets the soldier off for disobeying him and gives him a satchel of gold..

and a bath.

Can you imagine Old Testament Yahweh being that nice? Me neither. His response to Adam and Eve for doing the same kind of thing was to punish curiosity. Yahweh likes his flock neutered. The Devil lets the soldier go because he knows there is no consciousness without flouting the rules, without thinking outside the box, without the grit in the oyster. What was important was not that the soldier obey but that he went about his duties as sacred tasks and devotedly fed the fires. It is this which makes gold of sweepings. Through both devotion and disobedience the soldier brings together his own opposite natures so that he can finally say, ”I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my king as well!”