BARBARIAN

“Well, you know, sometimes when you hate, you’re in Love, Flora.

If you love someone, you want to kill them.”

Peter Quint 

“Every man has a double anima. He comes factory equipped — it is absolutely ingrained— with two visions of woman. How he manages this dilemma says a great deal about his integrity. The first is the heavenly vision, a Beatrice-like figure who leaves him speechless at the world that she opens for him. Beatrice appears early in a man’s life, and all he can do is store her away until he is strong enough to reencounter her. The other vision is an earthy woman who is lots of fun, sexually attractive, and perfect for courtship. She has all the human attributes, as well as the dark aspects —a dragon, a bitch, a whore. Every man is torn between the light and dark expectations of woman. 

And every woman has experienced man vacillating between these visions.

The woman’s animus also comes doublea knight on a white horse and a barbarian. Her soul guide, usually a male figure, will guide her in much the same manner as Beatrice guides Dante. If you’re homosexual, the same thing happens, but the labels are reversed. We all follow the same path.

Beatrice, the heavenly anima figure, is the vision of all that is tender and beautiful. If you are personally unlucky, like Dante— although lucky in an impersonal way— the person who awakens Beatrice in your life will vanish or even die, separating herself from you. Beatrice can live within you only in subtle form. If you marry Beatrice, your marriage will drift off, because it is more a kind of worship than a marriage; or you will turn your Beatrice into the earthy anima image and then wonder what happened to the goddess you married. Probably, like Dante, you will marry an earthy woman who will bear children and help manage your household. You are companions, and  you talk and fight and make love and go through the vicissitudes of life together. But she is not Beatrice.

At age forty-five or fifty, when you have raised your children and become accomplished in your work, suddenly you fall into a hole. The more sensitive and intelligent you are, the deeper the hole might be. A guide in the form of Virgil may come and list all the things in your life that have gone wrong. These are the nine levels of Hell. Your guide, your intelligence, will dis-illusion you. “ Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is a classical beginning to what Jung called the “ individuation process,” or the spiritualization of a man. If I could rewrite that sign, it would say, “Give up all expectations and presently held concepts.”

 

The job of your intelligence is to catalog Hell for you, to tell you all the things that don’t work. If your integrity is sufficient, if you go forward, Beatrice will come in the form of a radiant vision of hope and the feminine to take you the rest of the way and gently deposit you in Heaven. This will be one of the most profound experiences of your life.

Modern men and women have forgotten how to take this journey. Even with the best of motives— trying to find that vision of life that will nourish us and give meaning to the progression of our days on earth—we do crazy things. We let our marriage go to pieces and marry someone else, hoping to find the visionary feminine in her. We would do well to learn from Dante. Most important is to remember that Virgil, the one who helps us discern what is wrong, and Beatrice, the heavenly guide, are both interior figures and that this is an interior journey. It has its exterior dimension. If you are an artist, a poet, a healer, a teacher, or a mystic, you will produce outer, tangible results of your journey. But the journey is essentially inner. This is the most important thing to learn.

You will never find a Beatrice to marry, because she is in your imagination, your art, and your prayers. When you seek her in an interior way, she will come in an instant. But you must be humble enough to ask your feminine side for these rare qualities of tenderness and beauty, receptivity and love. Without doing so, it can be difficult to become truly whole. Even if you experience her as a real woman who has entered your life, the grace that has descended upon you is your inner awakening, catalyzed by this wonderful experience. 

It is not the other. It is in you.”

 

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.

“ I am a democrat (1) because I believe in the Fall of Man. 

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. 

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in Democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. 

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're NOT TRUE. 

Whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. 

I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. 

I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. 

Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. 

The real reason for Democracy is just the reverse. 

Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. 

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. 

But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don't think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values -- offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other - the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow - is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called "these troublesome disguises" (2). We want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive. We want it, on proper occasions, to appear -- in the marriage-chamber, in the public privacy of a men's bathing-place, and (of course) when any medical or other emergency demands. In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive. It is there, of course, in our life as Christians -- there, as laymen, we can obey – all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers – all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.

This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws, but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked (3). This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman -- taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman's part.

The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other -- that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut -- whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead -- even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served -- deny it food and it will gobble poison.

That is why this whole question is of practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.”

(1) C.S. Lewis lived and wrote in England. Hence, his reference to "being a Democrat" had nothing to do with our (USA) "Democratic Party". 

(2) John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, line 740. 18 

(3) Naomi Mitchison, The Home and a Changing Civilization (London, 1934), Chapter I, pp. 49-50.