And The Prophecy of The Wise Ones was fulfilled, when
A Talking Man
fell from The Skies,
to bring
The End of Days.”
— Lawgiver, 68th. Scroll, Chapter I
SISTER AGATHA:
There is a contagion, a corruption,
passing through This World
from one sufferer to The Next.
For those unfortunate to fall victim to it,
Life becomes incurable.
They lose the Divine Ability to DIE.
As their bodies rot, their consciousness persists.
Even as dust, their pain goes on.
It is a secret every gravedigger keeps.
There are those among us destined
to scratch at our coffin lids for all Eternity.
If you work among The Dead, it's not Death you fear.
It's The Alternative.
HARKER :
Is there any salvation for such creatures?
SISTER AGATHA:
I Don't Know.
HARKER :
Have Faith!
SISTER AGATHA:
Faith is a sleeping draught
for Children and Simpletons.
What we must have is a plan.
HARKER :
Dracula's one of them, isn't he?
SISTER AGATHA:
Undead?
Undead certainly but, from your account,
I think he is much more complicated.
“[These soldiers] are recruited into an apocalyptic battle with some ancient Enemies of Humanity, a race of beings called the Sheeda, who are familiar to us from folk tale and legend as ‘the Unseelie Court’, or the people of ‘Faerie’ among many other names.
Periodically, these Sheeda arrive like locusts in their millions in huge floating ‘Castles’ they use to ‘harvest’ civilizations which have reached their peak. The Sheeda ransack these cultures and take away their treasures, their achievements, their learning to enrich their own burned-out culture.
The name is from the Irish Sidhe, pronounced ‘Shee’, as in banshee.
The Sidhe were the Fairy Folk, the strange ones from the hills who haunt the old legends of so many cultures. I had a wild idea about what these legends might REALLY be describing and realised I’d found the perfect villains for this story. I based my portrayal of the Sheeda civilization itself on a dark, inverted Goth image of Queen Elizabeth I’s England.
They’re very evil, decadent and corrupt but as I say we don’t reveal their TRUE nature and who they really are until later in the series. In FRANKENSTEIN! issue 4 in fact, ‘Frankenstein vs. Fairyland’.”
The Ultra-Marine Corps are the LiveHero Vaccine dose which he used to inoculate Earth-Prime against incursions and infections by The Sheeda by injecting them directly into Our World at the very beginning of The 21 st. Century —
To gift Us all with immunity from The Harrowings and The Harvest of Summer’s End, beneath the Blood Red setting of The Sun.
How, then, is the personality that balances respect for social institutions and, equally, creative transformation to be understood? It is not so easy to determine, given the complexity of the problem.
For that reason, we turn to stories.
Stories provide us with a broad template. They outline a pattern specific enough to be of tremendous value, if we can imitate it, but general enough (unlike a particular rule or set of rules) to apply even to new situations.
In stories, we capture observations of the ideal personality.
We tell tales about success and failure in adventure and romance.
Across our narrative universes, success moves us forward to what is better, to the promised land; failure dooms us, and those who become entangled with us, to the abyss.
The Good moves us upward and ahead, and Evil drags us backward and down.
Great stories are about characters in action, and so they mirror the unconscious structures and processes that help us translate the intransigent world of facts into the sustainable, functional, reciprocal social world of values.*
The properly embodied hierarchy of values— including the value of conservatism and its twin, creative transformation — finds its expression as a personality, in narrative — an ideal personality. Every hierarchy has something at its pinnacle.
It is for this reason that a story, which is a description of the action of a personality, has A Hero (and even if that someone is The Antihero, it does not matter : The Antihero serves the function of identifying The Hero through contrast, as The Hero is what The Antihero is most decidedly not).
The Hero is The Individual at The Peak, The Victor, The Champion, The Wit, The Eventually Successful and DeservingUnderdog, The Speaker of Truth Under Perilous Circumstances, and more.
[Cyberlab]
(The Chess Board is in place.)
Mr. CLEVER :
There. That was easy.
The Game has just started.
Doctor, why is there NO record of You
ANYWHERE in the databanks of
The Cyberiad?
Oh, you're good.
Oh, you've been eliminating
Yourself from History.
You know you could
be reconstructed by
The HOLE YOU’VE LEFT.
[Ten Forward]
(Data is about to speak, then changes his mind)
WORF:
Wait. What is it, Commander?
DATA:
I am sorry to bother you,
but I have a question of a personal nature.
Do you have a moment?
WORF:
...A Moment.
DATA:
I have heard you mention that you once experienced A Vision.
WORF:
Yes. When I was young my adoptive parents
arranged for me to partake in
The Rite of MajQa.
DATA:
I understand it involves deep meditation
in the lava caves of No'Mat.
That prolonged exposure to the heat
induces a hallucinatory effect.
WORF:
Why are you asking me about this?
DATA:
I have recently had an unusual experience,
which might be described as A Vision.
WORF:
What happened?
DATA:
An accident in Engineering shut down my cognitive functions
for a short period of time,
yet I seemed to remain conscious.
I saw My Father.
WORF:
You are very fortunate.
That is a powerful vision.
DATA:
If it was A Vision,
I do not know how to proceed.
WORF:
You must find its Meaning.
If it has anything to do with Your Father,
you must learn all you can about it.
In the Klingon MajQa ritual,
there is nothing more important
than receiving a revelation
about Your Father.
Your Father is a Part of You, always.
Learning about him
teaches you about yourself.
That is why no matter
Where He Is or What He Has Done,
you must find him.
DATA:
....but I am not looking for My Father(?)
WORF:
.....Yes, of course.
Do not stop until you have
The Answer.
DATA :
Thank you, Worf.
We know what it looks like --
We can make one.
[Zeos computer room]
(M.E.N.T.A.L.I.S. is a wreck of molten plastic.)
DOCTOR:
That was close.
ROMANA:
How did they manage to miss?
DOCTOR:
They weren't aiming at me,
they were aiming at that, the control centre,
like a scorpion stinging itself to death.
As soon as it sensed I was trying to interfere with the sequence,
it destroyed its own control centre.
It's mindless now,
clicking toward oblivion.
How long, K9?
K9:
Damage renders data unavailable.
DOCTOR:
(Thinks….)
The TARDIS!
ROMANA:
Come on, K9!
(They run for their lives.)
[Marshal's module]
PILOT:
Within range, sir.
MARSHAL:
Go in closer. As close as you dare.
(The Doctor, Romana and K9 enter the Shadow's lair and enter The TARDIS.)
[TARDIS]
The Doctor enters with
Five of The Six Pieces of The Key to Time.
DOCTOR:
Here, take a look at this.
ROMANA:
Ah, you put the five pieces together. Good.
DOCTOR:
Have you got the tracer?
ROMANA:
Yes.
DOCTOR:
Lock it in. Lock it.
ROMANA:
Now what?
DOCTOR:
Well, it was just an idea --
I thought if we had Five-Sixths
of the pieces it might give us
some power —
Obviously Guardian Technology
doesn't work that way.
ROMANA:
If only we had The Sixth Piece.
DOCTOR:
Yeah — !!
Or a Sixth Piece...!!
ROMANA:
What do you mean?
Pointing --
DOCTOR:
What do you see there?
ROMANA:
A Gap.
DOCTOR:
Exactly. A GAP —
The exact shape of The Sixth Piece.
ROMANA:
Oh!
DOCTOR:
We know what it looks like —
We can make one.
The Necessity of Balance
Because doing what others do and have always done so often works, and because, sometimes, radical action can produce success beyond measure, the conservative and the creative attitudes and actions constantly propagate themselves.
A functional social institution — a hierarchy devoted to producing something of value, beyond the mere insurance of its own survival — can utilize the conservative types to carefully implement processes of tried-and-true value, and the creative, liberal types to determine how what is old and out of date might be replaced by something new and more valuable.
The balance between conservatism and originality might therefore be properly struck, socially, by bringing the two types of persons together. But someone must determine how best to do that, and that requires a wisdom that transcends mere temperamental proclivity.
Because the traits associated with creativity, on the one hand, and comfort with the status quo, on the other, tend to be mutually exclusive, it is difficult to find a single person who has balanced both properly, who is therefore comfortable working with each type, and who can attend, in an unbiased manner, to the necessity for capitalizing on the respective forms of talent and proclivity. But the development of that ability can at least begin with an expansion of conscious wisdom: the articulated realization that conservatism is good (with a set of associated dangers), and that creative transformation—even of the radical sort—is also good (with a set of associated dangers).
Learning this deeply—truly appreciating the need for both viewpoints—means at least the possibility of valuing what truly diverse people have to offer, and of being able to recognize when the balance has swung too far in one direction.
The same is true of the knowledge of the shadow side of both. To manage complex affairs properly, it is necessary to be cold enough in vision to separate the power hungry and self-serving pseudoadvocate of the status quo from the genuine conservative; and the self-deceptive, irresponsible rebel without a cause from the truly creative. And to manage this means to separate those factors within the confines of one’s own soul, as well as among other people.
And how might this be accomplished? First, we might come to understand consciously that these two modes of being are integrally interdependent. One cannot truly exist without the other, although they exist in genuine tension. This means, first, for example, that discipline—subordination to the status quo, in one form or another—needs to be understood as a necessary precursor to creative transformation, rather than its enemy. Thus, just as the hierarchy of assumptions that make up the structure that organizes society and individual perceptions is shaped by, and integrally dependent on, restrictions, so too is creative transformation. It must strain against limits. It has no use and cannot be called forth unless it is struggling against something.
It is for this reason that The Great Genie, The Granter of Wishes — God, in a microcosm — is archetypally trapped in the tiny confines of a lamp and subject, as well, to the will of The Lamp’s current holder. Genie — genius — is the combination of possibility and potential, and extreme constraint.
Limitations, constraints, arbitrary boundaries — rules, dread rules, themselves — therefore not only ensure social harmony and psychological stability, they make the creativity that renews order possible. What lurks, therefore, under the explicitly stated desire for complete freedom — as expressed, say, by the anarchist, or the nihilist — is not a positive desire, striving for enhanced creative expression, as in the romanticized caricature of the artist. It is instead a negative desire— a desire for the complete absence of responsibility, which is simply not commensurate with genuine freedom.
This is the lie of objections to the rules.
But “Down with Responsibility” does not make for a compelling slogan — being sufficiently narcissistic to negate itself self-evidently — while the corresponding “Down with the Rules” can be dressed up like a heroic corpse.
Alongside the wisdom of true conservatism is the danger that the status quo might become corrupt and its corruption self-servingly exploited. Alongside the brilliance of creative endeavor is the false heroism of the resentful ideologue, who wears the clothes of the original rebel while undeservedly claiming the upper moral hand and rejecting all genuine responsibility. Intelligent and cautious conservatism and careful and incisive change keep the world in order.
But each has its dark aspect, and it is crucial, once this has been realized, to pose the question to yourself:
Are you the real thing, or its opposite?
And the answer is, inevitably, that you are some of both — and perhaps far more of what is shadowy than you might like to realize.
That is all part of understanding the complexity we each carry within us.
and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God
had taken from the man, made he a woman,
and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave
His Father and His Mother,
and shall cleave unto his wife:
and they shall be one flesh.' " That’s a walloping statement to put in there at the end of those three sentences. The "therefore" comes as somewhat as a surprise, but there’s an injunction there. It’s a good injunction. Man, I tell you, people who don’t do that have a hell of a time in their marriage. This is a good thing to know if you are married, or if you’re planning to get married: We have very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason. The injunction, here, is that’s secondary as soon as you’re married, and failure to do that makes your marriage collapse—and you deserve it to collapse, too, as far as I'm concerned, because it’s a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your unwillingness to extract yourself from the talon-like grip of parents, who are a little bit too much on the interfering side. But the injunction…There’s a deep injunction, here. It’s very complicated. One of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man: he was more like a hermaphroditic being. In that hermaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection that was split into male and female. Part of the goal of human beings is to reunite as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection. That’s actually the goal of marriage from the spiritual perspective. Jung wrote quite a bit about that. It’s such a good idea. I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married.
They were from Northern Alberta, but both their heritages were Swedish. They did this cool thing as they were being married: they had to hold a candle up between them while they were being married. You think, well, what’s the candle? It’s a source of light; it’s a source of illumination; it’s a source of enlightenment; it’s the candle that you put on Christmas trees in Europe. So it’s the light that emerged in the darkness, in the depth of winter. It’s a symbol of life in darkness; it’s the reemergence of the sun at the darkest, coldest time of the year—which is also associated, symbolically, with the birth of Christ for all sorts of complicated reasons. So the candle’s all that. The next question is, why do you hold it above you? Because what’s above you is what you’re below to. It signifies something transcendent. Why do you both hold onto it? Because you’re both supposed to hold onto the light, right? And you're supposed to be subordinate to the light. You ask, well, who’s in charge in a marriage? Well, the light! That’s the idea. So you come together as one thing. You’re no longer two things. It isn’t what's good for you, and it’s not what’s good for your wife: it’s what's good for the marriage. The marriage is about the combined being, which is the reassembly of the original hermaphroditic being at the beginning of time. That’s the idea, and that’s all packed into these four sentences. All of these sentences have a tremendous history of interpretation associated with them. It’s just endless, and that's one of the lines. It’s also an antidote to the idea that women taken out of men—which is also the reverse of the biological process, by the way—makes women, in some sense, subordinate to men. That is not built into this text. I don't see that, at all, as built into the text. There’s something else that’s associated with it, too. The reason Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep is because—you have to remember what happens. She has parents who are quite old, and so they're pretty desperate to have a child—like so many people are now. They only have one child—like so many people do now—and they don’t want anything to happen to this child. It’s a miracle, and there's only one of them, and she’s the princess, and so we’re not letting anything around her. They have a big christening party, and they invite everybody, but they don’t invite Maleficent. Maleficent is The Terrible Mother; She’s Nature; She’s The Thing That Goes Bump in The Night; She’s The Devil Herself, so to speak, and she’s everything that you don’t want your child to encounter. So The King and ueen saying, well, we just wont invite her to the christening…It’s like, good luck with that. That’s an Oedipal story, right? the Oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by overprotecting him or her, so that instead of being strengthened by an encounter with the terrible world, they're weakened by too much protection. And then, when they’re let out into the world, they cannot live. That’s the story of Sleeping Beauty, and that's what the king and queen do. They apologise to Maleficent when she first shows up. They have a bunch of half-witted excuses why they didn’t invite her. 'We forgot'—I don't think so. You don't forget something like that. And she kind of makes that point: you don’t just forget about the whole horror of life when you have a child. You might wish that it might stay at bay, but you do not forget about it. The question is, do you invite it to The Party? And The Answer is, it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be. If you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added advantage that, maybe, they won’t leave home. You can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life, instead of going off to find something to do for yourself. And then, of course, you can take revenge on them if they do have any what would you call impetus towards courage, that you sacrificed in yourself 30 years ago, and that you want to stamp out as soon as you see it develop in your child. That's another thing that would be quite pleasant. That's what happens in Sleeping Beauty. Well, none of this is pleasant, and nothing that happens in that story is pleasant. Sleeping Beauty is naive as hell. They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three goody-two-shoes faeries, that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power. There’s nothing maleficent about them. And then she falls in love so badly with the first idiot prince that wanders by that she has post-traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse. That’s what happens. And then she goes into the castle, and she’s all freaked out because she met the love of her life for like five minutes, for God’s sake. That’s when the spinning wheel—that’s the wheel of fate—pops up, and she pricks her finger. They tried to get rid of the wheels of fate, with their pointed end, but she finds it, pricks her finger, and falls down, unconscious. Well, she wants to be unconscious, and no bloody wonder. She was protected her whole life, and she’s so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her. She wants to go to sleep and never wake up, and so that's exactly what happens. And then she has to wait for the prince to come and rescue her. Well, you think, how sexist can you get? Seriously, because that’s the way that that would be read in the modern world—it’s like, she doesn't need a prince to rescue her. That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish. You can say, well, the princess doesn’t need a prince to rescue her, but, you know, that's a boneheaded way of looking at the story. The prince isn’t just a man who’s coming to rescue the woman—and, believe me, he’s got his own problems, right? He’s got a whole goddamn dragon he has to contend with. The prince also represents the woman’s own consciousness. Consciousness is presented very frequently in stories as symbolically masculine, as it is with the logos idea. The idea is that, without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. You can read it as, well, the woman who’s sleeping needs a man to wake her up. Of course—just like a man needs a woman to wake him up. It’s the same damn thing: that’s the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty. But it’s also the case that, if she’s only unconscious, all she can do is lay there and sleep like the sleep of the naive and damned. She has to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so that she can survive in the world. Of course, women are trying to do that like mad, but that's partly what's represented in a story like that. That’s partly what’s implicit in this idea: unless the woman is taken out of man, so to speak, then she isn’t a human being: she’s just a creature. That’s partly what’s embedded in this story. So you don’t want to read it as a patriarchal…You don't want to read anything that way, really. I won’t bother with that. But, really, we can do better than that. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." The other thing about Marriage —
This is really worth knowing, too, and I learned this, in part, from reading Jung.
What do you do when you get married? That’s easy : You take someone who’s just as useless and horrible as you are,
and then you shackle yourself to them,
and then you say, "We’re not running away,
no matter what happens." Yeah.
That’s perfect, because then
you don’t get to run away. The thing is,
if you can run away, you can’t
tell each other The Truth --
If you tell someone The Truth about You
and they don’t run away, then
they weren’tlistening.
If you don’t have someone around who can’t run away, then you can't tell them the truth. That’s part of the purpose of the marriage. It’s like, I’ll bet on you, and you bet on me. It’s a losing bet—we both know that—but, given our current circumstances, we’re unlikely to find anyone better. Two things that come off of that…You know, people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right. Here's something to think about, man, and to put yourself on your feet: if you went to a party and found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn't run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right, at all. It’s like the old Nietzschean joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them. Or it’s the Woody Allen joke: I never belonged to a club that would take me as a member. That's a very interesting thing to think about. You’re going to shackle yourself to someone who’s just as imperfect as you are. Then the issue is, you might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate. You might think, well, there's some things about you that aren’t going so right, and there's some things about me that aren’t going so right, and we’re bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years. We can either straighten this out or suffer through it for the next five decades. People are of the sort that, without that degree of seriousness, those problems will not be solved. You’ll leave things unnamed, because there's always an out. It’s the same thing when you're living together with someone. People who live together before they’re married are more likely to get divorced, not less likely. The reason for that is, what exactly are you saying to one another when you live with each other? Just think about it. "Well…For now, you’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in—hah—conveniently, if someone better happens to stumble into me." Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that? They’re willing to play along with it, because they're going to do the same thing with you. That’s exactly it: "Yea, yea…I know you're not going to commit to me, so that means you don't value me or our relationship above everything else. But, as long as I get to escape if I need to, then I'm willing to put up with that." That's a hell of a thing. You might think, how stupid is it to shackle yourself to someone? It’s stupid, man. There’s no doubt about that. But compared to the alternatives? It’s pretty damn good. Without that shackling there are things you will never, ever learn, because you’ll avoid them. You can always leave, and if you can leave, you don't have to tell each other the truth. It’s as simple as that. You can just leave, and then
You don't have anyone
You can Tell The Truth to.
Jordan Peterson's Analysis of Sleeping Beauty
"Jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and Freud. Those were his two main intellectual influences—I don’t think one more than the other. He split with Freud on the religious issue. That was what caused the disruption in their relationship. I think it’s an extremely interesting historical occurrence. It might be of profound significance.
Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Oedipal myth. The Oedipal myth, from a broader perspective, is a failed hero story. The Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who grows up, but then, accidentally, becomes too close to his mother, sleeps with her, not knowing who she is, and, as a consequence, blinds himself.
There’s a warning in that story about human development gone wrong.
I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well.
Human beings have a very long period of dependency,
and one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many of people’s problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family.
They’re consumed by the family drama.
They can’t get beyond what happened
to them in their family.
They’re stuck in The Past.
That’s equivalent—symbolically speaking, you might say—to the idea of being too close to Your Mother — of the boundaries being improperly specified. That happens far more often than anyone would like to think.
As I said, Freud thought that it was a universal.
Jung had a different idea. His idea was that it wasn’t the failed hero story that was the universal human myth: it was the successful hero story. That’s a big difference. It’s seriously a big difference. The successful hero story is—remember in Sleeping Beauty…You may remember this, in the Disney movie…The evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon. She’s not going to let him out until he’s old. There’s this comical scene where she’s down in the dungeon, he’s all in chains, and she’s laughing at him, telling him what his future’s going to be like. She’s quite evil. She paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle, getting on his horse that’s so old it can barely stand up, and him with grey hair. She recites the story of his eventual, triumphant departure from the castle as an old and decrepit man.
She has a great laugh about it.
It’s nice. It’s a real punchy story.
It’s really something wonderful for children, that story.
The Prince gets free of the shackles, and the things that free him are three little female fairies. It’s the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon. It’s very interesting and accurate from a psychological perspective. It’s the negative element of the feminine that encapsulated him in the dungeon, and it’s the positive element of the feminine that frees him. The evil queen is not very happy, when he escapes. You may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off cosmic sparks. She’s quite the creature, enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon. And then the prince has to fight with her, in order to make contact with sleeping beauty and awaken her from her unconscious existence. It’s a brilliant representation of the successful hero myth. He doesn’t end up staying in an unholy relationship with his mother, let’s say. He escapes, and then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined, and is ennobled by that. As a consequence, he’s able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma. That’s a Jungian story, and that’s the story that he juxtaposed against Freud.
Freud thought of religious phenomena as part of an occult tide that would drown rationality. That’s why Freud was so vehemently anti-religious. Jung thought,
"No, that’s not the case. There’s something
profound and central to the hero myth."
Jungian clinical work is, essentially, the awakening of the hero myth in the analysand—in the client, in the patient—to conceptualize yourself as that which can confront chaos, and triumph. That’s associated with the ennobling of consciousness and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female. I’m a skeptical person. I’m a very, very skeptical person. I’ve tried, with every trick I have, to put a lever underneath Jung’s story, lift it up, and disrupt it. I can’t do it. I think he was right, and that Freud was wrong—I mean, I have great respect for Freud. I think he got the problem diagnosed very, very nicely.
