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.
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