The Remarkable Case Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
November 24, 2017
The Remarkable Case Of
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
by
Dr. Anton Polarion
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest…in order that the creations of our mind should be a blessing and not a curse for mankind.
–Albert Einstein
In 1953 a sci-fi novel was published by Arthur C. Clarke which he entitled ‘Childhood’s End.’ I read it only a couple years ago and while I don’t believe I got his point the story has haunted my imagination since then. In the novel he depicts a situation in which the first phase of evolution has flowered, and a second phase is about to begin out of the blown flower or the seed of the first.
Just after the end of WWII Clarke may well have believed than an old order of evolution had matured and a new one was beginning. His symbolism notwithstanding it is clear the evolution was not beginning a new phase, unless he knew something he wasn’t telling, but it is possible to view the post-war period as a culminating point in the historical continuum.
Writers are frequently more sensitive to such shifts than other people. Assuming that the historical continuum had at least transited its first phase, as I do, and was in fact beginning a new phase, which I only postulate, then it is possible to review the historical evolution of mankind and its various sub-special components as completed units. I intend to place Edgar Rice Burroughs in his place in that historical continuum.
Now let us by a feat of Wells/Einsteinian legerdemain roll the paper into a cylinder and step across the seam into that earlier phase of the historical continuum.
For tens of thousands of years the flow of the historical continuum appeared to be nearly as even and uninterrupted as the flow of the mighty Congo from the immense distance of Stanley Falls to the Stanley Pool.
Change there was but so slow as to cause barely a ripple until the accumulated changes resulted in the disruption of human consciousness that occurred in the Victorian Period.
Since then the historical continuum has been as turbulent as the series of rapids on the Congo below Stanley Pool.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in file.
–Vachel Lindsay, The Congo
The French Revolution was important but that was mainly a political transition from the late feudal to the early modern. What we’re really concerned with is the challenge it gave to the psychology of man, that time when the Congo and the Jungle became a symbol of Man’s conscious and unconscious mind and his conscious mind cut through the darkness like a golden track. To put a convenient date on the psychological transition let’s put it at 1859 when Darwin’s
Origin of Species’ was published; nothing challenged the ancient mentality of Mankind more. It was then that the Congo crept North of the Equator to flow through the Euroamerican mind.
Darwin’s theories rent the mind of most men in two. Some like Edgar Rice Burroughs understood instantly but most resisted for decades while a hundred fifty years later the howl of disbelief can still be heard. The Semitic vision of the origin of man and the world as portrayed in Genesis became impossible for any reflective Westerner to believe. The hold of the ancient Semitic system of belief was so strong that exoteric scholars could not express their evolutionary views openly for fear of losing their jobs while having their lives ruined in what might risibly be termed ‘premature McCarthyism.’
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
–Vachel Lindsay -The Congo
Nevertheless the brief period from 1859 to 1914 was one of the most exciting and productive periods of history. The past had been or was being made intelligible to Western Man’s inquiring mind. As unpleasant as the fact may be to some people, modern understanding is solely the product of the mind of Western Man or Homo Sapiens III. Neither the African of HIS nor the sterile Semites nor the various sterile Mongolid races contributed one iota of understanding in this period, very little since and that only under the influence of the West.
While the Semitic Freud was delving into personal psychology his great rival, CG Jung, was exploring the development of human consciousness to open a psychological understanding of the mind of mankind in which the individual might be included and explained. In other words, he was placing the individual in the historical continuum. An esotericist of some note, it is to Jung and the school he founded that we are indebted for our understanding of all the phases of consciousness, their development and evolution.
At the same time that our increasing awareness allowed us to see clearly into the past for the first time, the pace of change was becoming so rapid that it was possible to project current trends into the near future. In conjunction with the rapid increase in scientific discoveries a futuristic or science fiction became possible.
In the popular mind the foundations for futuristic fiction were laid by the vastly underrated H.G. Wells.
Understanding the past, projections into the future and tremendous technological achievement, lent this period such great self-confidence that it was thought that anything was possible to the mind of man. The attitude was abruptly brought to an end in 1912; not by the First World War but rather by the unthinkable fact that Man’s mind had erred in thinking that it could build an unsinkable ship. When that great ship, the Titanic went down it took the pride of Western, which is to say human mind down with it.
The period of 1859 to 1914 was also one in which the absolute superiority of the ‘White race’ seemed not only apparent but real in fluorescent colors. In fact, White, or HSIII, superiority was acknowledged by all the people of the Earth, who were overawed by Western achievements. It was only after 1914 when the confidence of HSIII was shaken that the counter-attack became possible and success plausible. Even then this was an internal schism between the right people of the West and the wrong people of the Reds.
I have studied the notion of evolution of Dugald Warbaby in his essays ‘Tarzan Over Africa’ and ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed.’ Based on his notion I would like to explain how the various sub-species are to be characterized during this first historical continuum.
The character of a sub-species is fixed from the moment of its mutation. Everything that it will ever be able to do it can envision at its inception; there is no evolution of ability within a sub-species its abilities unfold to its limits as its development progresses.
In you believe in Darwin’s concept of natural selection then you must believe that the various sub-species segregated themselves from the other sub-species on the basis of likeness. Further, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection so did various races form within a sub-species. Each race within a sub-species will by natural selection exclude all others who are not true to type until the race is uniform in appearance and psychology.
To use the African model: If one race is flat nosed and thick lipped then those characteristics will be valued. Any who do not conform to the ideal will be ejected from the race or killed.
If nearby thin lipped people with a bridged nose exist those two peoples will come into conflict with each other. The ensuing war between the physical and psychological types will be to the knife. In a word: genocide. Undisturbed by outside forces the battle will continue until either one race is exterminated or one or the other moves from the vicinity. This is what natural selection means. This is the history of Man. The notion of natural selection was also put into the words: survival of the fittest.
Thus HSI claimed sub-Saharan Africa for itself expelling the mutated HSII and possibly the Semites if they mutated at the same time . HSII migrated from the Mediterranean Basin and on into Western Europe. The Semites separated from HSI and HSII or were driven away migrating into the Arabian Peninsula, a backwater. HSIII when it mutated was either expelled from HSII or separated themselves to occupy the area near the Caspian Sea.
The English geneticist Bryan Sykes believes that the various Mongolid races mutated from HSIII a mere ten thousand years ago although this seems unlikely. The Mongolids like the Semites are also a sterile offshoot. They migrated across the steppes to the Eastern seaboard of Asia. Thus, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection when the traceable historical continuum becomes apparent one has HSI in Africa, HSII in Western Europe and HSIII in the Caspian area of Central Asia, the Semites occupying Arabia and the Mongolids in Eastern Asia.
The first confrontation between the sub-species in historical times came when a people of HS III derivation migrated to Mesopotamia. There they created a civilization which may have been influenced by an HSII population already in possession. Either HSIII alone or together with HSII, this people created the Sumerian Civilization.
From Sumer To The World Trade Center
In the present struggle in Eastern Europe the element of religious antagonism is the most important factor in the problem. The question originally one of race and government has become to a great extent one of religion. …Muslims…use the Sheriat, or law embracing or based upon the Cor-an and its commentaries, and this is declared by many persons in Western Europe to be utterly inapplicable to Christian subjects. Here, then, is the real difficulty; is Mohammedanism so plastic as to be adapted to the reforms which it is universally admitted…are required, or must it be eliminated altogether from Europe? If an affirmative answer be given to the latter proposition…there is no solution of the difficulty but a religious war, and such a war as the world has never yet seen.
–Mohammed and Mohammedanism.
Anonymous reviewer in the
Quarterly Review, January 1877
The answer has proven to be that Moslemism is not so plastic as to be adjusted to rational or Western psychology. Moslemism is an expression of the Semitic psychology. That psychology is particular to the Semitic sub-species. In the Darwinian sense it is part and parcel of natural selection. HSIII and the Semites are psychologically incompatible. That cannot be changed.
Now, the Semites could never have created a civilization on their own but the glitter of the HSIII Sumerian civilization drew them from their desert haunts much as the glitter of Western civilization has drawn the Semites from their desert oil fields today. Bear in mind that the Semitic character was set a hundred thousand years before Sumer and that no matter how circumstances may change their character cannot. Its stern limits are set by genetic evolution.
It is to be assumed that just as the Semites first infiltrated Western civilization then attacked and destroyed the symbol of Western supremacy, the World Trade Center in the Western capital of New York City, that they committed a similar outrage against Sumer five thousand years ago. Character, methods and tactics in a sub-species do not change; as it is it was and ever shall be.
If one analyzes Semitic methods and ethos which will have remained unchanged for the five thousand years of recorded history it will be readily seen what transpired in Sumer and why the Sumerian civilization was obliterated.
The main body of Semites undoubtedly blamed a militant minority for whatever crime was perpetrated against the Sumerians. The Semitic story of Cain and Abel may point the way to the nature of the dispute, just as the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu may present the Sumerian version of the quarrel. Believing they were dealing with an honorable people, rather than driving the Semites away, the Sumerians believed that the Semites were sincere and that they could get along with them. Thus, while palavering endlessly the Semites continued to infiltrate Sumer until they had sufficient numbers within and sufficient military power without to displace the Sumerians in their own land. ‘Ye shall live in houses that ye never built.’ As the Bible says.
Not having inherent scientific ability the Semites gradually replaced the scientific basis of Sumerian society with their own brand of fanatical ignorant religion.
Thus, the Semites appropriated Mesopotamia and Syria occupying the coasts of the Mediterranean while retaining Arabia. The deadly pall of Semitic ignorance settled over the Near East, or Western Asia, however you look at it. Contemporary Egyptians styled them ‘vile Asiatics.’
Over the centuries the Semites came into direct conflict with the Egyptians who, if I am right in the origins of the Libyans of Lower Egypt, were an HS II people. As empires grew larger and came into direct contact the Semitic empire of Assyria was able to conquer the HSIIs of Egypt in the seventh century BC. Thus, in the Darwinian struggle for supremacy the Egyptians were eliminated as a people. They have never recovered being now a remnant after a genocidal persecution of centuries. Their place has been taken by Semites.
As in Sumer the Semitic character immediately began to attack the scientific religious culture of Egypt in an attempt to destroy it while superimposing their own fanatical religious culture, the culture of ignorance.
The HSIII Persians ousted the Semitic Assyrians being in turn ousted by the HSIII Greeks who were replaced by the HSIII or possibly HSII Romans.
Now, following their sub-special manner a group or race of Semites, known in history as Jews, who had been displaced in an intra-sub-special conflict with the Assyrians in 586 BC, had been infiltrating the various kingdoms of the Mediterranean from Gaul to Egypt and Libya much as their ancestors had infiltrated Sumer. They followed the intolerant Semitic impulse by combating the religion of their host countries. They aggressively over turned altars and insulted the religion of these nations.
Unwilling and unable to assimilate themselves, as in the prototype of Sumer, they sought first to infiltrate and then to conquer. In the Roman case, much as in the Semitic attack on the World Trade Center, they made their move prematurely and had insufficiently infiltrated the enemy territory while having no military force without to complete conquest. In the resulting wars known to history as the Jewish Wars the Romans all but exterminated the Palestinian Jews while the Jews within the empire stood by helplessly.
In the ensuing syncretistic Semito-Christian religion the Semites acquired a disproportionate influence over the Greek scientific thought completely suppressing it. In keeping with the Semitic Sumerian tradition the Semito-Christians attacked all science and learning in an attempt to stultify the Greek or scientific influence in their attempt to impose the ignorance which was in keeping with their native intellect. The result in the West was what is know as the Dark Ages.
Then, in the seventh century AD an Arabian Semite by the name of Mohammed re-evaluated the situation to come up with a new and more determined attempt to impose Semitism on the world.
After Sumer, in the Jewish attempt of the conquest of HSII and HSIII, the Jews were so cranked out that in their pride they excluded all from their religion but their own small race of Semites. This created a situation which in a direct confrontation with the majority must always lose. Mohammed realized the error of exclusiveness rewriting the rules so that even forcible proselytization to his new Semitic religion was preferred.
Thus, by enrolling potentially unlimited auxiliaries under a religious banner he was able to augment the numbers of Semites so that there was a chance of conquering the world under the banner of ignorance.
Mohammed also undoubtedly realized that even though the Semites had gained a preponderant influence in the Semito-Christian religion that eventually the majority would reject the foreign Semitic influence. It was necessary then to impose Semitism on the majority by physical force. He thus organized the Semites into a military force capable of attacking the world.
The Arabs quickly overran North Africa while their converts the Moors entered Spain quickly conquering that nation. Without a pause they swept through the Pyrenees to penetrate deep into Europe where they stopped nearly at the gates of Paris from which they were driven back into Spain. The Spaniards then began the Reconquista which took them nearly a millennium to accomplish. Thus Europe barely escaped being impaled on the lance of ignorance.
Although it is generally believed that at the beginning of the Arab conquest a brilliant scientific civilization was created this notion is completely false. The Moslems rode over an existing HSIII Greek scientific culture which they immediately assaulted in much the same manner as that of the Semito-Christians. It took them about three hundred years to suppress the Greek scientific culture until today there is not one shred of scientific learning in Moslem lands. Instead they dynamite anything that challenges the ignorant bigoted Moslem view of religion.
From that first impulse to the present day the Semites have never ceased their worldwide attack on both the West and the East. What the Assyrians failed to do in Egypt, Mohammed’s fanatical Moslems have accomplished. With ceaseless tireless energy and will Moslems have sought to impose their ignorance on the world.
The situation in 1877 when the Russians, Poles and Austrians were driving the Moslems out of Central and Eastern Europe was essentially that of today. Whether you like it or not Milosevic was continuing and winning the war referred to by the prefacing quote in 1877. The reviewer in the Quarterly Review realized that one must drive the Moslems out or accept the stultification of the HSIII species. That is what Milosevic was doing.
There was some surcease for the West when the Slavs and Austrians succeeded in driving the Moslem power back into Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. However Moslems remained successfully active in Africa, India and the Far East.
It was only Western Science that provided the means to temporarily crush the Moslems and put them in their place. That is where matters stood when the first historical continuum ended in 1945.
Regaining courage and strength from their oil reserves the Semites once again following in their five thousand years practice began to infiltrate every country in the world while consolidating themselves in their core areas.
Whether the attack on the West in New York was premature or not remains to be seen in the response the West makes. If it follows the Sumerian model of toleration then it must lose this five thousand year battle with the forces of ignorance. If it follows the Roman model and destroys Mecca and Medina as the Romans were compelled to destroy Jerusalem, while either exterminating or confining the Moslems then civilization will survive at whatever cost. The Hitlerian solution is so extreme as to cause revulsion. However if we are truly a scientific people both in physics and psychology we do have the means although we probably lack the will to conquer. Perhaps that was the Sumerian problem, too much prosperity and comfort to imperil. Like them we will probably be too supine to assert our superiority. We should be able to manage pretty well if we assume the will the defeat the enemy. This battle will be fought as a test of wills. This is a colder war than the war with Communism.
This same sort of analysis can be applied to every sub-species on the planet; the potentialities and possibilities of each has become an established fact, their future actions can be forecast from their past history. I do not intend to go into each, but it should be clear that the former Chinese leader, Mao Ze Dong, was true to the Chinese sub-special type. No matter what the Chinese may say, Mao bared the Chinese soul.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Strides Into The Scene
The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs straddled the great 1914 division of this both terminal and seminal period from 1859 to 1945. His youth was lived in the shadow of the Little Big Horn where Custer died for our sins in 1876 the year after Burroughs was born. The Plains Indians were still being overrun in his youth while he himself participated in the last Indian battles against the Apaches in the Southwest. Even as the Indians were being defeated he saw the success of man’s attempt to fly, the introduction of the telephone and movies. Henry Ford introduced the Model T making a mass market auto industry a reality almost at the same time Burroughs sat down to begin his Tarzan stories. And then the Titanic sank.
Burroughs was a pulp fiction writer. I think it can be argued that the pulp fiction magazine originated with the Strand Magazine in England. Pulp fiction called for a different approach than literary fiction. Literary fiction is designed to appeal to refined, informed or cultured tastes while pulp fiction was designed as popular entertainment for the widest possible audience.
Thus, Literary authors have tended to look down on popular writers. However one result of universal literacy was that ‘common’ tastes prevailed over fine literature. Today almost no one can tell you who the American literary author William Dean Howells was or have even heard of him, yet you may be certain that he and his contemporaries thought his literary immortality was secured.
Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for literature yet I doubt that even one person in a million could identify him. Booth Tarkington won two Pulitzer prizes which no one else has ever done yet the mention of his name draws blank stares. He wrote good stuff too which one hopes won’t be forgotten. ‘Seventeen’ was a real charmer.
Strangely, the great popular fiction writers are known not so much for themselves as for their creations. Thus, everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but many would be stumped by the name Arthur Conan Doyle. You almost have to be a specialist to know who Bram Stoker was yet Dracula is a piece of furniture in everyone’s mind. Not one in an infinite number can identify Gaston LeRoux but all know the Phantom Of The Opera, his creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ name is fairly well known but not everyone can connect him to his universally known creation, Tarzan. Not even in his home town, Tarzana.
Burroughs came at the tail end of that crop of popular writers who have been the staple of twentieth century literature. He was too young to be a part of the Kipling, Wells, Haggard and Doyle scene although circumstances did make him a friend of the OZ creator, L. Frank Baum.
Even thought H.G. Wells was only six years his senior Well’s writing career began in the 1890s. He had been famous nearly twenty years before Burroughs put pen to paper. And yet Burroughs writing connects him to this pre-1914 literary scene as a sort of younger sibling; he belongs to this tradition. Nor is his creation, Tarzan, inferior in reputation to any other literary creation of the time with the exception of the archetype of the twentieth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Even then, many, if not most people don’t realize that there is not only one Tarzan novel but a series of them.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ eyes had seen most of the seminal events of this productive pre-1914 period when he sat down to write. He was able to reflect on them all. Unlike his near contemporaries he did not create the era so much as recapitulate it. From 1914 to 1945 was pretty much a playing out of these earlier developments.
Darwin’s theory of evolution had created a defined racial hierarchy at the bottom of which was the Negro and at the top of which was the EuroAmerican White. In between were the Semites and Mongolids. This notion is reflected in Burroughs’ writing.
While it was believed that this was the order of evolution there was no scientific basis for proving what was apparent to the eyes.
The great disrupting discoveries in physics and psychology had already been made and were becoming popularized. Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and others were leading a sexual revolution; the Feminist Movement was in full tilt while in a few years the unthinkable would occur when Communism seized power in Russia in 1917 which made the post 1914 world so different while people were slow to understand the magnitude of the change. And then there was the introduction of the income tax which disturbed ERB so much in ‘Tarzan And The Ant Men.’
Amazingly Burroughs eyes were so acute he was able to understand and incorporate all these developments in the Tarzan novels without ever mentioning any by name. In his dedication to ‘entertainment’ he was able to write around, below, above and through these developments without letting any of them obtrude didactically into his stories. Therein lies, I think, the secret of his success. While H.G. Wells became a didactic preacher for his causes at the end of his career thereby dating himself; Burroughs sublimated his opinions while yet always coming down on the right side of the question. He cannot be considered a reactionary or even a conservative; he always understood the nature of the question and saw the correct viewpoint. Thus, he remains ‘modern’ or current.
Burroughs has been accused of ‘racism’ for his views on evolution but the accusation misses the point. Bear in mind the consequences of evolution and natural selection. To speculate on the nature of evolution and apply the results is not ‘racism.’ After all, not only did Burroughs have no trouble with evolution but he seems to have a well thought out notion of it which differs little from Darwin’s natural selection and seems to be closer to the more accurate scientific genetic explanation. One might call ERB a speculative evolutionist.
This is a remarkable achievement as in 1912 when he began to write, no academic could openly reject religion in favor of evolution without being expelled from the academic community. Even though they knew better they still proclaimed that evolutionary beliefs did not challenge religious opinions.
Burroughs, courageously one might say, disregards all religious considerations, writing about evolution as though it were an accepted and undeniable fact. Tarzan experiences every phase of evolution in his development. He was reared as a beast, consorted with the Africans, then considered the lowest form of humanity, and went directly to being a civilized EuroAmerican and then backtracked to become the chief of the Black Waziri then becoming the Great White Potentate of all Africa.
The significant point here is that Burroughs apparently considers the Negro as a distinct species. Rokoff, the Russian villain in ‘Son of Tarzan’, tells Jane that as her husband was born a beast so Jack, his son, will be placed amongst an African tribe to be reared in the evolutionary stage of the Negro, that is, between the apes and homo sapiens.
Blacks are also differentiated culturally by Burroughs; he does not deal in rude stereotypes. He is aware of cultural differences between African tribes. His proud Waziri are the crème de la crème of the African tribes in every respect, especially in never having submitted to Arab slavers. American Blacks such as Robert Jones of ‘At The Earth’s Core; who have been subjected to different cultural influences in the United States are portrayed entirely differently from the various African Blacks. ERB has a keen eye for distinctions, in dialect and speech most especially.
He himself was an avid reader. This is no more apparent than in his treatment of his Arab characters. He never traveled outside the United States so his knowledge of Moslemism and Arabs had to be acquired completely from books. As Warbaby pointed out in ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed’ Burroughs was a keen student of Moslem culture. He perceived the complete lack of Science in Moslem thought nearly predicting 9/11.
It is very true that he has no great liking for his Arab characters. They are uniformly disreputable and bad.
Yet they are not stock characters. There is a great deal of individuality about them. Personally I found Amor Ben Khatour, the abductor of Miriem in ‘Son of Tarzan’ a terrifying and realistic character. I thought the sub-plot between Meriem’s father and Khatour well handled.
That the Arabs are all villains may be attributed less to ‘racism’ than the fact of their occupation. They are all slave traders. The Arabs living in Africa were associated with the slave trade. Being a slave trader in Arab society was something like being a dope dealer in ours. Just because someone want to buy the product doesn’t mean they want to be associated with the dealers. The dealer is usually a disreputable person whether in drugs or slaves. Anyone who has read his Burton and Stanley can form a pretty accurate idea of a slaver’s character.
How then could Burroughs depict his Arabs as any less than brutal, mean, disreputable men. This is what a slaver is; this is what Burroughs understood; there is no racism involved. He doesn’t descend into name calling. Rather Burroughs grapples honestly and accurately with some fairly difficult problems.
Burroughs was cleverly synthesizing the ideas and learning of the 1859-1914 period in a way in which those of us of the post-1945 generation who were at ‘Childhood’s End; could use his opinions and attitudes to build a base of opinion on which to extend our own attitudes into the future as a basis of our own lives.
As evidence that Burroughs succeeded is the fact that his character named Tarzan who no longer has a home in a geographical location called Africa still exists as the Lord of the Jungle in a psychological projection of our subconscious called Africa.
NOW I SEE THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Yes, that terrifying Congo, that symbol of the Heart of Darkness, the savage untutored wildness creeping through the jungle of our nocturnal fears, the psychological malaise that affects us all. How to find that golden track of consciousness that will relieve us of our uncertainties and make the world safe for us, that is the question.
Perhaps Burroughs’ greatest success was that he created a character to represent our conscious minds while reducing the world of subconscious terrors of this jungle of Africa called Life to a manageable form. In this mental Africa by the force of character we can all feel less threatened and more at home as we cruise down our personal Congo in our very own ‘Lady Alice.’
Long live Tarzan and God Bless Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Part IV: A Mother’s Eyes
May 7, 2007
A Mother’s Eyes
by
R.E. Prindle
Part IV
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
In Part I, Huxley’s Eyes, I showed the Structural Psychology of the Male. I hope I made the consequences of the X and y chromosomes clear.
In our day the drive by women is to establish the notion that the differences between the sexes are superficial or cosmetic rather than substantial and genetic. The notion began to have an effect on society in the late nineteenth century. The consequences for society have been disastrous. H.G. Wells may not have known to what he was referring in his autobiography of 1934 when he says that of the nineties: In those gentle days before the return toward primitive violence begam…
Edgar Allan Poe may be considered to be a presage of that return. The return toward primitive violence is now nearly complete. At the bottom the cause of this primitive violence which women claim to abhor is Woman’s refusal to either accept or understand her Structural Psychology. She refuses to acknowledge
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The Female role in relation to the Male in an attempt to create some fantasy in which she is actually dual sexual enjoying the best of both sexes while avoiding the worst of the Male.
Before the evolution of sexuality at some time in the past there existed a unisexual organism that contained all four chromosomes, XXXy. This notion was well understood in ancient times. Although sexual identity began long before the evolution of man the ancients understood that the first organism must have been unisexual and male in character. They didn’t know that the y chromosome was the reason but they did know that the first organism logically had to have a male identity.
Thus before either the egg or chicken there existed a unisexual organism of a male character. The y chromosome is the essence of the matter.
When sexual identity evolved, as there were three X chromosomes and only one y chromosome, of necessity one sex received two Xs and one an X and a y. The y like it or not is the critical chromosome. It is what the female lacks and misses. It is what makes the male intellectually and physically dominant.
This was recognized in Greek mythology as after the subordination of Hera to Zeus she acknowledged his physical superiority and what Homer refers to as his mind of infinite power. Hera was left with physical inferiority and a low intellectual cunning to achieve her ends.
As above, so below.
Just as the X side of the body is weaker and more passive so the Female with a double X is smaller and less assertive. This is not to say less significant or important. The species cannot exist without all four chromosomes. The y chromosome is not deteriorating and on the verge of extinction as some emasculates claim. Indeed, as the animal mother of the race Woman has a significance out of proportion to her share of the division of sexual spoils.
Because the sexual division of spoils has denied the Female the very powerful y chromosome she has a longing for it to complete herself. This was expressed in ancient times by the female adoration of the bull and then the horse. Sigmund Freud picked this up in his usual smutty sexual way by characterizing the longing as Penis Envy which while
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it gratified his vanity rather missed the point. Nevertheless he was correct. On a brainstem level the Female recognizes her incompleteness.
While the Male clothes his Anima with Female role models, the Female clothes both her X chromosomes with Female role models of two different types; a passive feminine set for the Anima and an aggressive male oriented for the Animus. The longing for the Male rests between the two.
Now, while the Female has been denied the y chromosome she has been gifted with the ability to give birth to a man child or son. Hence the ancient symbol of the Great Mother seated on the Throne beholding the Son in her lap while the Father stands ineffectually behind her gazing down. This scene is replicated in the birth of Jesus, the Savior of Man, in the manger or eating trough.
It is a shame that the present day refuses to understand the significance of the story of Christ for the psychic well being of mankind. The avant garde among us have now passed to the Scientific Consciousness and the way of the future but the main body is still mired in the Religious Consciousness.
Just as Evolution is replicated in the development of the physical organism so one must replicate the evolutionary development of consciousness in the individual. To cut out any part or parts is to do oneself irreparable damage. One should learn to separate the symbols from the scourge of human religious and political activities.
There never was a single person killed in the name of Christ, blasphemers merely used the name to cover their own vile passions. Bear in mind that neither Polarion nor myself are nominal Christians. We hold no brief for Churches. We just know where to look for the sun shining through the clouds.
While Evolution has denied the Female physical strength and aggression it has awarded her the Throne on which society rests. She has the power to make or break her men.
Several adages which are not taken as seriously as
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they should be attest to this fact. It is said that a man’s wife is his luck. Nothing could be truer. As another adage says: Behind every successful man stands a woman. Thus the character of a man’s wife will either build him up and push him forward or drag him down and push him under. It can equally be said that behind every failure stands a woman. that woman will be the man’s mother or her reflection that he married.
Women since Wells’ ‘gentle days’ fail to recognize their dual role. They tend to see themselves only in the positive light with no negatives.
So it is in the matter of her son. The true role of the Mother is as ‘cow-eyed’ Hera. Now, in the myth of Heracles and Eurystheus the ancient Greeks make this abundantly clear. The Matriarchal Heracles as consort of Hera must have represented the perfect symbiotical relationship between man and woman. The Sun blesses the Earth and the Earth bursts forth in productivity. The Patriarchate turned Hera into Heracles’ enemy. In the Patriarchal myth Hera blessed Eurystheus and cursed Heracles. Indeed when Heracles was a little, tiny baby Hera sent two snakes to kill him in the cradle. Cut ahead to to Jesus in the manger when Herod decreed the death of the firstborn. To show the power of the Patriarchy over the Matriarchy the sweet baby Heracles strangled a snake in each hand.
The power of the Matriarchy was in no way nullified. In ‘Hera and Poe’ I indicated that the longer a mother nurses a child the better his chances of success in life. Indeed, the act of early weaning may have a profound negative effect on the child with or without abandonment. The very act of weaing may be interpreted by the mind of the boy child as rejection.
So with the Mother’s blessing Hera’s favorite, Eurystheus was a weak chicken livered man who dominated both society and Heracles while Heracles the strongest and best man who ever lived was relegated to a role of dependency and the frustration of his superior abilities because of the animosity of the Mother. The most powerfull Male figure in the universe couldn’t rescue him from this ignominy.
Hera achieved this end even though she was physically weaker and intellectually inferior to her lord, Zeus, through mere cunning.
page 4.
Heracles was indentured to the weak Eurystheus for whom he was compelled to perform twelve of the most impossible labors imaginable. Each one would have been enough to baffle an ordinary man.
After completing the first labor he reported back to Eurystheus who was so terrified in Heracles’ presence that he retreated into a bronze vessel half buried in the Earth which represents the womb of the Great Mother. Thus the Mother’s influence is such as to make a despicable man rule and make an admirable man serve.
So, if it is true that behind every successful man is his mother it is also true that behind every axe murderer is his mother. It may be said that the Hand That Rocks The Cradle makes or wrecks the world. Check out the story of Ma Barker.
The last problem is the crux of the period from ‘those gentle days’ before the return of primitive violence to these latter days when primitive violence rules.
Woman complains about the claimed increasing violence of men toward women. Women’s solution is to punish men for their lack of ‘respect’ for women. Actually the increasing violence is caused by women’s lack of respect for both themselves and their sons.
If only the rules of Structural Psychology were applied women would undoubtedly be better mothers; but women have been given very active brains that function on the everyday level as well as those of men. In fact, since women are more single minded because of their child bearing faculty their brains may function better on the everyday level. However on the speculative or creative or scientific level Structural Psychology favors the Male.
Moreover her intelligence makes the Female unsatisfied with her role as perpetuator of the species. She want all that belongs to the female and because of what Freud called Penis Envy all that appertains to the Male. You begin to see what either the possession or lack of the potent y chromosome means.
page 5.
Because of both her child bearing capabilities and her inferior size in relation to the Male Woman has acquired a superior will characterized by low cunning. Unfortunately for her undisciplined intelligence and will to thwart her role as Mother of the Species she chafes at the responsibility of motherhood.
In the case of Huxley his mother willfully rejected him to start her girl’s school. In both Huxley’s and Poe’s cases the death of their mothers was unpreventable but disastrous to them and the women associated with them by the nature of things. In Ted Bundy’s case his mother willfully abandoned him giving him to his grandparents to rear. Speck’s mother denied him everything.
The result in all these cases was disastrous. Huxley sought out a woman who would allow herself to be persecuted for his mother’s sins; Poe was driven mad while it is almost certain judging from his writings that he became a killer of women; in Bundy’s case there is no doubt he avenged his mother’s abandonment of him on dozens of young women; Speck uncorked one day to slaughter a number of girls; not only girls but nurses who are known as ‘angels of mercy.’ Would Speck have murdered them if his mother hadn’t betrayed her role as an ‘angel of mercy?’ Look for the symbolism.
Women condemn these acts as representative of the Male character but they are not representative of the Male character; they are the result of unavoidable disruptions in the mother/son relationships: of Huxley and Poe and the completely avoidable disruptions in the cases of Bundy and Speck.
If Bundy’s mother had been stronger in resisting her seducer or had accepted the consequences of her weakness by keeping her son with her it is a certain fact that Ted Bundy would never have killed those girls.
The number of mutilators, stranglers and serial killers seems to increase on a daily basis. Women demand more jails and tougher punishment to stem this rising tide of brutality against women because of ‘horrid men.’
page 6.
I suggest that because of the high divorce rate, day care schools and the number of unwed mothers that the crimes against women will continue to escalate. What has been done in the past few decades cannot be undone. Domestic violence will in all probability continue to increase as sons visit their maternal resentment on their wives, daughters and other women.
Unless educated to the reason for their rage they will never know why they are reacting as they do nor will they be able to control or change their actions. Nor, are they any more responsible for their actions which arise from Structural Psychology of the brainstem than their mothers.
Whether the female of the species likes it or not the fault lies with them more than with their sons. A well nurtured son of a loving mother will seldom if ever visit violence on women.
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle can either build or wreck the world. What’s it going to be, Mom?
The end of A Mother’s Eyes.
A Mother’s Eyes
Part III
Cow Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe
by
R.E. Prindle
Stories under consideration:
Metzengerstein 1832
Berenice March 1835
Morella April 1835
Ligeia 1838
Fall Of The House Of Usher 1839
William Wilson 1840
Eleonora 1842
…Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is not the loftiest intelligence- whether much that is glorious- whether all that is profound- does not spring from disease of thought- from MOODS of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect…In their visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill…to find that they have been on the verge of the great secret.
-Eleonora 1842
page 1.
Sonnet- To My Mother
Because I feel that, in the heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of ‘Mother’,
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you,
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you,
In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
For mother- my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself, but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.
-1849
page 2.
As we study Poe keep in mind Dali’s picture: The Temptation Of St. Anthony. Keep those symbols in the forefront of your mind.
Edgar Allan Poe is a classic study on the effect of abandonment by the mother on the psyche, specifically affecting the brain stem as part of Structural Psychology. Poe exhibits the classic symptoms of the eyes, the horse and the female substitute for the Mother as well as adding several other twists due to his extremely analytical mind.
As the opening quote from his story Eleonora indicates Poe understood that he was quite mad. Although he was able to describe quite clearly in symbolical language the source of his madness his intelligence was unable to sift below the psychological barriers which would have cleared his mind of his madness.
In five really remarkable stories with extreme clarity he delineates his problem. They are the first story he wrote, Metzengerstein of 1832, Berenice of March 1835, Morella of April 1835, Ligeia of 1838 and Eleonora of 1842.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher and William Wilson demonstrate his inability to deal with the problem adequately. Under stress his personality begins to disintegrate.
Poe lived a short life of forty years from 1809 to 1849. His first story, Metzengerstein, was written when he was only twenty-three. It would have been interesting if he had lived long enough to consolidate his stories into at least one full length novel, other than Arthur Gordon Pym.
His own mother died in 1811 when he was only two. Thus the connection between his and his mother’s eyes was disrupted very early. He was then adopted by a Mrs. John Allan for whom he had the greatest respect and love. Mrs. Allan died February 28, 1829 when Poe was twenty years old. The horror of the death of this second mother festered in his mind for three years until his feelings began to find expression for him in 1832 with Metzengerstein.
page 3.
The woman he refers to in his rather confused poem- Sonnet- To My Mother- was the mother of his wife Virginia, a Mrs. Clemm. This poem was written shortly before his own death two years after the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. As the poem says, Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law filled ‘his heart of hearts’ where Death had placed her when her daughter Virginia died.
Clearly Poe was having mother figure after mother figure taken from him by death. His response apart from his literary outpourings was to drug and drink himself to death in 1849 two years after Virginia’s demise.
The Mother Archetype is truly a very powerful figure. In giving the figure prime importance Sigmund Freud was absolutely correct. What does that Mother figure mean to a man?
In ancient Greece the Great Mother goddess was ofter referred to by Homer as ‘Cow-eyed’ Hera. This image has been difficult for subsequent generations to understand. Many current translators of the Iliad drop ‘cow eyed’ in favor of euphemisms they can understand. If we would understand Homer this is a very serious mistake. Hera as the Great Mother is associated with the cow for good reason.
Whether she was ‘cow-eyed’ before she caught Zeus philandering with Io is unclear. Caught in the act Zeus attempted evasion by turning Io into a cow. Hera retaliated by having Io tormented by a vicious gad-fly. The gad-fly drove Io in the form of a cow from Greece to India to Egypt. In Egypt Io was transformed back into human shape as the goddess Isis. Formerly the Egyptians had depicted Earth and Sky, or the sources of plenty, in the form of a woman arching over with her feet on one horizon and her fingers on the other. After Io was introduced to Egypt the image of the woman was replaced by that of the cow.
page 4.
In nearly every country Io visited the cow has been considered a sacred animal. Whether in India, Egypt or the cattle raising tribes of Africa the cow was never killed. This miraculous animal was so beneficial live that its life became sacred. The cow was not only wealth but a symbol of wealth. One imagines that the first coin might have been called the ‘cow.’
Cattle lifting or rustling has been a way of life since perhaps the time of Io if she represents when the cow was domesticated. To lift a man’s cattle was to strip him of all social significance while making the lifter significant in his place.
Thus in Greek Mythology and history men and gods are stripped of significance by the lifting of their cattle. When the god Hermes was born his first act was to lift the cattle of Apollo thus assimilating himself with that god. Apollo tracked Hermes down but was so pleased with the little trickster that they established an accord, became blood brothers so to speak. Both sides of the coin.
In the Odyssey the Cattle Of The Sun were inviolable. Odysseus incurred the wrath of the Sun when his men after having been warned not to, killed a single cow. As the Sun sees all from his heavenly abode retaliation was quick and sure. Obviously that was a reason the Sun’s cattle were inviolable.
page 5.
The story of the lifting of Geryon’s cattle by Heracles is also significant. In former times before the advent of the Patriarchy Heracles as Hera’s consort had been the Sun God. When the Patriarchy replaced the Matriarchy Hera was assigned to Zeus while Heracles was demoted to a human and made an enemy of Hera.
Now, prior to the end of the Ice Age before the Mediterranean Basin was flooded, Hera and Heracles, by whatever names they were then known, must have been the chief gods of the pre-flood peoples of the Mediterranean. Thus two cults of Heracles grew up as the Western Mediterranean became separated from the Eastern Mediterrean in the post-flood Basin. One cult in the East in Greece and the Levant and another in the West of Spain.
The two cults must have come in conflict as the Greeks colonised Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Marseilles and the northern Spanish Coast around Barcelona. It became necessary for the Spanish cult to be suppressed or co-opted in favor of the Greeks. Thus, in myth the Greek Heracles is sent West to lift the cattle of the Spanish Heracles or Geryon. Relieved of his cattle the Spanish Heracles became a non-entity while all the glory accrued to the Greek Heracles.
Such was the poltical and social significance of cows.
page 6.
The economic importance of cattle was equally great which, of course, led to their social importance. Cows produced offspring. Fifty percent bulls and fifty percent cows. So one’s social importance increased every Spring if you could hold onto your cattle. The bulls being superfluous in large numbers, there being no reason to waste valuable feed on them, were used as sacrifices in the ancient Mediterranean. The gods were given the bones and fat while the flesh was consumed by the human votaries of the holocaust. Thus cows, without killing them, provided an abundance of meat. They also provided milk and its various by-products including butter and cheese. The African tribes bled their cattle to acquire nourishment from the blood so it is not unlikely that the Greeks and others did the same. The Africans never did figure out butter and cheese.
The cow being female was naturally related to the Mother Archetype. Hence we have ‘cow-eyed’ Hera. The mother is to her son, like a cow to mankind, a source of superabundance or should be. She sacrifices her own happiness, or should, to supply all his needs, she feeds him from her own body. She psychologically nourishes him with the love pouring from her eyes. It seems to be a fact that the longer a son nurses from his mother the better his chances for success in life are. Sons who nurse for two years or more are assured of the best chances.
Thus to be abandoned by your mother, death being a form of abandonment, is the greatest tragedy that can befall a son.
In Poe’s case he was abandoned by his mothers, once at two and once at twenty and by his wife-mother surrogate at forty-seven. The unconscious strain was simply too much for him so he drank and drugged himself to death succeeding in 1849 at the age of forty.
Fortunately he recorded all the classic symptoms plus some in his series of magnificent short stories. They are or should be a treasure trove for the analyst.
page 7.
As noted above, when his adoptive mother died in 1829 his reaction was intense. Poe began his inquiry into his anguish in a raging examination of the effect on his Ego or Animus in Metzengerstein. The story culminates in the destruction of Metzengerstein’s house or castle by fire. Fire is a purifying agent. The house is a psychological symbol for the self just as a room in the house is a symbol for the mind. As his house was being consumed the smoke gathered above to form the shape of– a horse. Thus as with Aldous Huxley and my other examples the mother is related in the male to the horse and more especially the eyes. It is not improbable that if Hera had come into existence after the introduction of the horse into Greece that she would have been known as horse-eyed Hera. As it was Athene who may have been a Patriarchal attempt at superseding Hera was depicted on occasion theriomorphically with a horse’s head and hence horse’s eyes.
I can’t say for certain, as I am not a clinical psychologist, but I am reasonably sure this symbolism is not true for the female although the female retains a need for the masculinity expressed by the strength, force and grace of the male horse. This need was transferred from the bull. As women their symbolism is probably relative to the cow as in ‘cow-eyed’ Hera.
Indeed, many men derogatively refer to women as cows. To do so may refer to a hatred of women and mothers in these men. The significance of all this symbolism has been ignored far too long.
Poe knew he was distaught or mad. Madness may indeed be a road to intelligence or self-discovery. Duller intelligences are usually quite satisfied, seeing no reason to question or investigate. Another madman, the poet and singer Roger Miller, put it as that he had too much water for his land. In other words his intelligence was bubbling out all over the place drowning his land or stability. When land and water are in balance in Miller’s scheme one has normality. When land is more prevalent than water one has a desert and a pretty nasty fellow. According to Miller too much water made one hep while a balance of land and water made one square. His moral was that squares made the world go round.
page 8.
He was certainly correct. Stolidity leads to solidity. Society needs a solid basis to exist as a beneficial organism. The mad, bad or sad in the proper proportions either leaven society or destroy it as at present when the Bohemian and Libertine influence is so dominant. The influence of all three has to be controlled or monitored or their intrinsic evil destroys any equitable basis for society.
But to return to an analysis of Poe’s stories.
Oppressed by his psyche the dam began to burst shortly after the death of Poe’s adoptive mother. First his own mother died when he was two and then his adoptive mother when he was twenty. The effect on his psyche must have been unbearable to cause such a violent irruption as Metzengerstein when he was twenty-three.
The story of Metzengerstein centers around what appears to be a flesh eating horse. There is only a brief significant mention of the horse’s teeth as the horse pictured on a tapestry in the attic or mind turned to look at M. with a baleful eye.
The same horse is then given to him by his grooms who capture it fleeing from the burning stables of M.’s rival Berlifitzing. They claim the horse is M.’s even though it was seen coming out of the burning stables and is branded with this rival’s initials W.V.B. in a rather unusual place for a horse, the forehead. No missing that brand, sort of reminds you of a wedding ring.
page 9.
Now, the horse with eyes and teeth is part of the Structural Psychology located in the brain stem. This one represents his dead adoptive mother. Poe had become estranged from his adoptive father, John Allan after receiving marked benefits from him as a child. The cause of the disruption is attributed to drinking and gambling but the literary evidence of Metzengerstein would indicate an intense sexual rivalry.
B. is the older man as was Allan. M. had just come of age following a course of action not too different from Poe’s. The horse, representing Poe’s adoptive mother, has B.’s brand on her. Or in other words the horse represents Mrs. Allan, B.’s wife. Disregarding all the evidence to the contrary M. is given the horse as belonging to him. Seems fairly clear on the surface of it.
She is a difficult flesh eating horse of firery temperament which only M. can ride. As Mrs. Allan was no relationship to Poe there can be no question of incest so that he could ‘ride’ or have sex with Mrs. Allan without incestuous guilt. In fact M. frequently rides off on her into the forest at night. Night is the usual time for love making while the forest is a symbol for the lost soul who cannot find his way.
The tapestry on which the horse is pictured is located in a very large room at the top of M.’s castle or house. Psychologically the house represents the self. The room represents one’s mind. The tapestry functions as memory.
page 10.
Having left on a night ride of some duration into the forest, as M.’s servants are anxiously awaiting his return M.’s house or castle myteriously bursts into flame. This must represent the death of Mrs. Allan or Poe’s being caught by Mr. Allan in flagrante dilecto. The horse returns at a mad gallop out of control bearing a screaming M. to rush straight into the burning house, up the stairs to the upper chamber and one assumes onto the tapestry. Then in a supernatural manner the violence of the flames subsides while the rising smoke forms the image of– a horse.
Forgive me for saying so if you are a Poe fan but the story qua story is stupid. Only as an allegory of Poe’s relationship to the Allans does it make sense, specifically the relationship of the Mother Archetype with the Son.
Metzengerstein was merely the first bursting of the dam; the next four stories on our list named for women develop the horror of Poe’s fixation on the Mother Figure. Let me say here that I do not believe that Poe’s adoption of the name of Allan refers in any way to John Allan; it is rather in memory and tribute to Mrs. Allan. The death of Mrs. Allan seared Poe’s mind. The trauma was so intense that his mind did become rather disordered.
Those teeth, those teeth which got such a brief mention in Metzengerstein form the focal point of his next story dealing with his horrible fixation. As with Huxley those teeth could bite you.
page 11.
Berenice is the story of the teeth of the flesh eating mare. In the story, in an abortive attempt to exorcise the demon of Mrs. Allan, Poe abandons the omniscient observer of M. for the first person. Berenice and Morella are now written in the first person. They are attempts to violently dispose of the horrifying losses of his Mother Figure. Always an astute psychologist Poe now creates an image of monomania. He knows he is quite distraught, men have called mad. The mania is centered around the teeth so briefly mentioned in Metzengerstein. All Poe can think about now is those teeth.
As noted in Huxley, the Mother Figure is always exempt from retribution so that one’s obsession is transferred to another woman usually a beloved but not necessarily.
Most of the violent so-called crimes against women by men can be traced directly to the man’s relationship with his mother. In other words, crimes are not against women per se but against mother surrogates. One has to look behind the symbolic victim to the source of the discomfort. The hand that rocks the cradle is at fault.
Ted Bundy, all the various stranglers and mutilators, Richard Speck, they are all retaliating the crimes of their mothers against them on other women. Bundy is an exceptionally interesting case when viewed from this perspective. His symbolism is quite astonishing.
page 12.
Extreme violence is only an extreme response to what the perpetrator considers an extreme crime against himself. One may assume that the way a man treats his wife or lovers is a reflection on the way he interprets his mother treated him.
The drive and push since the turn of the nineteenth century for the destruction of the family by Reds, Communists and Fellow Travelers can have only the most dire consequences. One can hardly consider the Reds well intentioned in their obtuseness. One might begin by examining their relationships to their mothers. In disrupting the eye to eye relationship of the infant with his mother they are in essence condemning the world to a reign of terror, and against women, unparelleled since the beginning of time.
On the score of rejection and abandonment one can only shudder at what the results of these idiotic infant day care centers the Reds favor will be.
A woman’s preoccupation with sex condemns her offspring.
One has to assume from Poe’s writing that he found his relationship with his adoptive mother of the most troubling nature. Whether he actually had sexual relations with her or only fantasized them the result is the same.
As I say, in attempting to exorcise or control her memory he concentrated on the man eating quality of her teeth. In the story Berenice the narrator becomes quite conscious of what he is doing.
In a fugue state he attacks the living Berenice restraining her in some way while he pulls every tooth from her screaming terror stricken head and then buries her alive keeping the teeth as souvenirs. When he is discovered coated in mud after having buried her he is horrified at this evidence that proves his guilt of which he is unaware.
page 13.
This, shall we say, is psychotic behavior.
Poe may have fantasized the whole incident but one wonders if somewhere he had not actually committed such a crime burying the woman’s body where it wouldn’t be retrieved. One has visions of Ted Bundy.
Imagine if Ted Bundy had written a series of ‘imaginative’ stories centered around his murders or if Richard Speck had written a novel about the murder of those nurses. Could the descriptions of the killings have been more realistic or chilling than Berenice?
Then turning quickly from the writing of Berenice Poe promptly followed with his story of yet another woman, Morella. Probably emotionally drained from the excessive violence of Berenice Poe is more subdued in Morella as he struggles to bring his agony under control. In Morella he is attached to a woman who he does not kill by burying alive. Instead Morella sickens and dies from neglect as the first person narrator subtly spurns her. Thus if he couldn’t defang and bury his mother alive from which she would only return to haunt him perhaps he could just sort of forget her. Really?
Morella is determined that he will not rid himself of her so easily. On her deathbed she gives birth to a daughter who is in reality herself. The narrator cannot help loving and devoting himself to this child although he never gives her a name. Still, necessity compels him when she is fourteen to have her baptized. Asked for the name compulsion makes him whisper the name ‘Morella.’ The child answers, ‘I am here’ and expires. Upon taking the child to the tomb to be buried beside its mother he finds the tomb empty. He just can’t pull those teeth.
page 14.
It was some three years after Berenice and Morella in 1838 that he returns to the theme in Ligeia. Here he tries to marry once again. The dominant theme of Ligeia is her eyes. A subordinate theme is her teeth. Once again after expatiating on Ligeia’s eyes for some two or three pages Ligeia sickens and dies but she warns that she will not go quietly into the beyond but that she intends to will herself back into life. Ye gods. Poe’s mother fixation does torment him. Why don’t you read Poes’ Sonnet- To My Mother again.
The first person narrator remarries but his memories of Ligeia remain so prominent that he disgusts his new wife. She in turn sickens and dies, in fact, she is murdered by Ligeia from beyond the grave in a supernatural manner. By some process of metempsychosis Ligeia as a mature woman gains possession of the corpse. The narrator is able to recognize the revivified body as Ligeia from her eyes and teeth. Definitely brain stem stuff.
Now, up to this point Poe is dealing with this intense stress in his own persona. This is an intolerable situation that cannot go on. Thus his ego or Animus splits in two as he creates a doppelganger who can deal more directly with the problem while he watches. In other words he remains himself as the narrator while creating a Ted Bundy like double.
page 15.
In 1839 he wrote ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’
While being more comfortable for himself, Poe’s personality enters a critical stage. The narrator visits the doppelganger, Roderick Usher, and his sister in their castle which is quite reminiscent of the castle of Metzengerstein.
During his stay Usher’s sister sickens and is thought to be dead. She is sealed in a coffin. The narrator helps Usher carry the coffin to a cell at the bottom of the castle. At this point Poe has passed the responsibility from himself to his doppelganger a la Bundy or Speck. Unlike Berenice in which the narrator personally tore out Bernice’s teeth while burying her alive the crime is now performed, albeit unintentionally, by a split off personality. Poe in essence watches deeds performed by someone else relieving him of guilt although in this instance he participates in carrying the coffin to the cell.
Significantly the cell is directly beneath his own chamber in the castle, from which cell he hears mysterious sounds as though the sister were stirring in her coffin. The two rooms answer to the brain and brainstem so that he is still unable to escape the specter of the Mother Figure.
Eventually the sister frees herself going to the same room in which Usher and the narrator are chatting. They are naturally together as dopplegangers must be. Usher throws open the door to discover his sister covered in blood. To his and the narrator’s horror they discover that they have buried her alive. She collapses on Usher and they both fall down dead.
page 16.
There is a correspondence here with Poe’s poem The Raven in which he hears a tapping on the door. Opening the door he finds no one there. The tapping transfers to his window. When the narrator opens the window the Raven enters to sit on a bust of Athene above his chamber door. Athene in one guise is the goddess of wisdom, her bird is the owl, so the Raven, an omen of death, replaces wisdom as the symbol of Athene. When the narrator leaves through that door he passes to the Land Of No Return.
As the narrator leaves the house or Usher, once again representing himself, great rents appear in the stone walls. The house collapses just as the castle of Metzengerstein burned to the ground. Perhaps Poe thinks he has solved his problem by dissociation but he is still not dealing directly with it. By killing off his doppelganger, Usher, and his sister he still has only an ineffective solution.
However he has now moved from intense first hand suffering to a suffering once removed in the creation of a doppelganger. He may believe that in killing the doppelganger as well as the Mother Figure he has disposed of his problem but once again he is deceived.
In William Wilson that directly followed Usher in 1840 the doppelganger has truly become an alternate persona. To punish himself for his inability to resolve the Mother Figure dilemma the double goes around defeating Wilson in all his criminal schemes. In the story the narrator leads a life of crime while the doppelganger functions as his conscience.
In a rather silly ending Wilson confronts himself in a duel realizing that it is he himself who is hurting himself. Thus he kills not only his doppelganger but himself. On the streets of Baltimore.
page 17.
This theme was examined well in the movie: Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me. Certainly Poe in his own life, this man of talent, is botching his own career. This of course begs the question would he have had the talent if he hadn’t been mad? If he had been one of Roger Miller’s squares who make the world go round no more notice would have been taken of him than any other square, whose name is Legion.
From Wilson, Poe moves to the last of his woman stories, Eleonora of 1842, only seven years from his death.
In this story his demon seems to be laid to rest as Eleonora finally gives her consent for the narrator to marry. One imagines that Poe’s union with Virginia receives the blessing of the Mother Figure. The question is why would she? What ulterior motive does Poe have? This brings us back to Poe’s Sonnet- To My Mother. Looked at closely this poem is evidence of a seriously deranged mind. This is not a poem to Poe’s mother or even Mrs. Allan.
‘My mother- my own mother’, he says, ‘who died early, was but the mother of myself; but you (Mrs. Clemm) are mother to the one I loved so dearly, and thus are dearer than the mother I knew…’ He mentions his own mother who died early while one presumes that Mrs. Allan was the mother he knew. Both previous mothers are now dismissed in favor of his mother-in-law because of what must have been a mother surrogate in his beloved Virginia.
page 18.
Now, what Virginia has in common with Morella and Ligeia is that she is sickly and dies while his beloved mother-in-law, who is more than a mother to him, whatever that might mean, is healthy and lives. Even then she is Poe’s ‘heart of hearts’ where DEATH installed her in setting Virginia’s SPIRIT free. No real murder in Poe’s mind. He rationalizes Virginia’s murder as that her soul was set free.
Can one find any similarities with Morella and Ligeia?
The appearance is that he married Virginia to obtain a mother. This may have been the only way he could assuage the pain in his brainstem caused by the loss of the mother he didn’t know and the mother he knew.
Now, Poe’s personality split back in 1839 or, at least, Usher was the first record of it. One imagines that Virginia was superfluous and possibly an impediment to enjoying his relationship with this latter day mother who Poe says is dearer than the mother he knew by that infinity with which ‘my wife was dearer to my soul than its own soul-life.’ Was his real mother his soul-life? If so that is quite some distance between the mother he knew, Mrs. Allan, Virginia, Mrs. Clemm and his own mother or soul-life. Certainly his deeply proclaimed affection for Mrs. Clemm was of very recent origin. Why this intense depth of affection so quickly? Thus when Eleonora released him to be married the conclusion is that Virginia replaced his real mother in his brainstem. She became a surrogate mother who had to die so he could resume a relationship with a true mother figure. Very possibly a sexual one or an attempted sexual one.
Once again, it is absolutely forbidden for a man to avenge himself on his mother’s person. Impossible in this case since Poe’s own mother died when he was two and the mother he knew when he was twenty. Nevertheless Hera’s great cow-eyes have seared his soul. His mother’s eyes appear again in the face of Ligeia and hence Virginia.
page 19.
A person may not be able to recall infantile impressions or memories clearly but they survive in Structural Psychology or what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious.’ As the infant mind has no way to put the experience into words or clear images the adult transforms them into metaphors which control his life but against which he has no defence as he cannot ‘remember’ in the sense of recalling them.
Poe could not punish his mother but he could select a mother surrogate and punish her while transferring his affections to the mother of she who was dearer to his soul than its own soul-life. All of Poe’s fictional heroines sickened and died except Berenice who the narrator actually mutilated and buried alive.
Poe himself had created a persona which would never murder a wife but he had also created a double who would and did inadvertantly in the character of Roderick Usher. Certainly Poe’s doppelganger was capable of doing what he could voyeuristically observe but still feel free of participation and, hence, guilt.
Which brings to mind the ‘Mystery Of Marie Roget’. Just as Ted Bundy rigidly created an amiable trustworthy everyday persona to live his life and a doppelganger who avenged himself on his mother by killing girl substitutes it is possible, I don’t say that it is so, that Poe himself killed Mary Rogers and possibly some others.
page 20.
It may have been a display of his genius in demonstrating that Mary Rogers was killed by a single person rather than a gang but on the other hand he created a doppelganger of Mary Rogers in the character of Marie Roget to demonstrate his reasoning. Perhaps he was so clever because he had actually committed the murder. It is not impossible that Poe split off a doppelganger of Mary Rogers in Marie Roget who was killed by Poe’s own doppelganger while Poe killed Mary Rogers.
That was a pretty neat trick for a deranged mind. He not only demonstrated a murder, he did it but no one caught on. Compare the idea behind the Purloined Letter.
There can be little question that Poe suffered severely in his Structural Psychology which was reflected in his personal psychology.
Here we may raise the question of what effect the balance of Menos and Ate has on a man’s actions. There must obviously be degrees of imbalance. For people like Huxley, Poe, Freud, Jung, Polarion and myself there is the creative outlet of Menos. Those like Ted Bundy and Richard Speck have insufficient Menos but are all Ate. Without a creative outlet they may be condemned to commit murders to express their anguish at their treatment by their mothers.
In Huxley’s case he was, on the Menos side, able to express himself in novels thus relieving the pressure while on the Ate side he appears to have become his mother while marrying a woman who would willingly compensate him for his mother’s neglect.
I hesitate to review my own behavior in that respect.
Poe who was much more deeply troubled seems to have had correspondingly greater gifts on the Menos side than Huxley while on the Ate side the pressure appears to have been so intense that he may have resorted to murder of unrelated women while he may surely have caused the death of Virginia by a combination of neglect on the one hand as evidenced by the examples of Morella and Ligeia or even willful poisoning as in the case of Ligeia and the narrator’s wife. The negative actions would have been caused by his doppelganger while Poe himself looked on.
page 21.
Jung and Freud, who while not abandoned by their mothers had troubled relationships with them, applied the Menos to make significant contributions to the understanding of psychology while their expression of Ate was either minor or extremely well hidden in Jung’s case and not exposed in Freud’s case.
I hope that Polarion and I are making our contribution to psychological understanding while on the Ate side we merely express indifference to externals.
All of us probably are or were introverts.
The solution of the problem is completely out of the hands of men. The solution, if there can be one, rests with The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.
End of Cow-Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe. Go to Part IV, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
Part II A Mother’s Eyes, The Baby Marie
April 30, 2007
A Mother’s Eyes
Part II
The Baby Marie.
by
Dr. Anton Polarion
Well, yes. What is this Baby Marie you ask. I’m going to tell you even though it’s a story I’m sure you won’t be able to understand. It is perhaps the most real story ever told but it’s reality will probably be too transparent for meager intellects. I almost said, like yours, but I didn’t because I want to retain your sympathy at least to the end of the story; after that you’re on your own and I don’t care.
You think that’s just a little bit too truculent do you? Well, maybe it is but I have my reasons which I am not going to divulge to people like you. Not least is the way I was treated as a child. Not only by strangers like you but by my own mother. I had enough problems with those others all my life. They gave me psychological complexes that it took me a long time to resolve. But then the unkindest cut of all was my mother.
page 1.
You say, oh pshaw, everyone has those kinds of problems. I’ll grant you that but you’ve got them in spades and haven’t resolved a single one. I’ve got a clean slate having resolved them all. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Well, so maybe everyone does have those sorts of problems, what’s that got to do with me? Let everyone else live their own life; I’ve got me to worry about. Besides if this generalized public you talk about is any kind of example look at the world these mutants have made. I’d laugh if I weren’t terrified.
I’ll take my own problems any day. Besides all my problems, psychological that is, have been solved since the Baby Marie came to live with me. Since then I’ve known only peace. Before the Baby Marie I only had problems with my mother’s memory and my eyes.
Yes, that old fraud Freud was right about one thing. The mother is the most important influence in a man’s life. Yes, I know, I should have said person’s but here’s a fact for you to digest, I’m a man not a woman. Let the little girls work out their own problems with their mothers. All that politically correct crap doesn’t have anything to do with my own mind so leave me alone and let me get on with my story as happened to me. I’m not going to acknowledge any more interruptions.
Speaking of fraud Freud this story doesn’t have much to do with him. All he ever did was take eggs out of other bird’s nests and sit on them himself like he was the one who laid them. If you know your sources you can write the whole substance of Depth Psychology without having to mention his name. It was all there, all the Fraud did was gather it into his own nest. He didn’t even do a good job of that. His notion of the mind is just a big joke.
page 2.
Well, no matter, you have to start somewhere and Freud did at least succeed in imprinting his ridiculous notions on the mind of more than one generation. He got the ball rolling now we have to get it moving in the right direction.
No, you’re wrong. I’m not writing this from inside an insane asylum. I’m saner than you are or ever will be or even could be. If you must know I write from the lap of comfort with a beautiful sylvan view out of my window. No Landor’s cottage but then that nineteenth century quality of perfection is lost for the next thousand years.
I’d say I’ve got a tall cool one in my hand but since the Baby Marie came to live with me I’ve had no desire to drink. In fact, if I do she’ll leave. I don’t want that.
So, my mother. She rejected and abandoned me when I was five. This is where Freud comes in. Freud didn’t understand how the mind works. More specifically he didn’t know how it was organized. Not his fault really; there wasn’t that much information available at the time. He was only a pioneer. Still, he shouldn’t have let on that he knew more than he did.
Let’s skip this nonsense. Suffice it to say that the brain is divided into right and left lobes and a conscious and subconscious mind. When the brain is presented with a Challenge which it cannot successfully handle the failure becomes a fixation in the subconscious. For every mental fixation there is a physical affect. The mind automatically converts its mental failure into a physical consequence. You see, that’s where the talking cure comes in. When you identify, recognize and express the fixation it and its’ physical affect are exorcised.
Real simple, not as easy as it looks for the central childhood fixation, but simple. The talking cure is one of those eggs Freud plucked from another’s nest; in this case his benefactor and friend, Breuer. Oh well, Breuer didn’t know what to do with it anyway. He could never have hatched that egg if he’d sat on it till he was a hundred or as old as Methuselah or possibly the hills.
Now, you see, these other people gave me a number of Challenges my mind couldn’t resolve and a whole bunch of fixations with detestable physical affects. As the affects all emanate from the mind you may include mental afflictions also.
OK. So I found my fixations and exorcised them. Straightened myself out in body and mind. Got rid of my constipation, post-nasal drip, everything. There were dozens. I felt great afterwards. But after a while you forget how great it is and concentrate on other problems. The amazing thing is after you get rid of the major ones the least significant fixations demand attention thereby assuming a significance they never had. They’re easy to understand and get rid of though. After exorcising the central childhood fixation all the other stuff is an anthill compared to the mountain of the central childhood fixation.
page 3.
So, now I think I’m home free but then I discover I’ve got another problem. My mother. But she isn’t anywhere in my conscious or sub-conscious mind. So where is she?
Aha!
I found her way down deep below both the levels of consciousness and subconsciousness. The brain stem. There’s one Freud missed. An obvious one, too. The Brainstem. The first brain in the evolutionary scheme of things. First you have the brain stem then the midbrain and finally the pre-frontal lobe evolves. So then Man can sneer as he looks down on the other vertebrates who have a lot more sense that he does.
Now all we have to do is rise to our scientific knowledge and get rid of that miserable attitude of the bible. There is no longer any reason to enshrine that immature consciousness with its primitive monotheism.
Here’s an obvious thing you probably never thought of before. Since the brain stem came first the sensory organs are associated with it. That’s right. The optic nerves are associated with the brain stem. When you get that REM, Rapid Eye Movement, when you’re dreaming? That comes from the brain stem.
What’s as old as the brain stem? Yo’ mama.
That’s right. Freud was right on that one. That’s a main reason why your mother is the most important influence in your life. Your mother’s eyes. Never thought of that one, huh? Well, plenty of song writers have. As an infant your mother’s eyes drilling into your own as you looked up from your breast feeding established that connection to the brain stem and your own eyes.
page 4.
So here’s what I found out. That connection between your mother’s eyes and your own is paramount. When your mother rejects or abandons you that connection between your mother’s eyes and your own is broken. That fires a lightening bolt right through your brain stem down below the subconscious part of the mind. At some time in your life you’re going to have trouble with your eyes.
The circumstances of the break will dictate the nature of your problem. If a scientific survey were conducted some sort of general rules could be drawn up. Heck, someone could catalog fixations and their affects. They will be the same with everyone. Nobody’s that unique. The exact form may vary but the affect will be same. We’re closer to mental health than most people think. It’s just that you people prefer to be crazy.
My mother remarried and reclaimed me when I was ten so I didn’t have any real trouble with my eyes until I was after forty. I’m younger than that now but that needs no explanation. I’ll die soon anyway.
I had to have these operations on my eyes a few years ago. I thought I would have to go blind. While I was waiting I read Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley. He was rejected and abandoned by his mother also, she died when he was fourteen. Then his eye problems started when he was sixteen. I realized immediately that my eye problems were connected to my mother too.
page 5.
My problem was that I knew my subconscious had been cleared out long before so that my problem with my mother couldn’t be in my subconscious.
The answer was revealed as answers of that type are, in one’s dreams.
I dreamt that I went down to the deepest spot known to man and there I knelt before a well. The well was dry; there was no water in it. It might be romantic to say I filled it with my tears but that’s not what happened. You know, science fails when you refuse to observe its tenets. That’s one of the big things wrong with world now, you want override obvious truths for emotional reasons. Think about it.
Since I had identified the ‘fixation’ and expressed it, by all the rules of Depth Psychology it should have disappeared, but it didn’t. The brain stem is different than the upper brain. Returning to the surface by the way I came I woke up.
Now I did have a dilemma. I thought I had the solution to my problem but I didn’t know how to apply it.
For a couple months I could only worry about it. Which is to say that by applying auto-suggestion I hoped to have my mind show me the answer. Naturally, it did.
The Baby Marie came to me. The Baby Marie is real but she’s just not flesh and blood. She came to me as all balms do, in dreams. I almost didn’t recognize her. It was close. I might have lost her with terrible consequences for myself.
I was at a party, in my dream, strange enough in itself as I never go to parties, wouldn’t know how to act at one; didn’t know how to act at this one. Fact is for some reason I never get invited. Who’d want to go anyway? There was much hilarity and boisterousness, two qualities I lack. I began to wonder why I went. Then a man, who while he may have been an alter ego, I still don’t know, asked me to come into the other room where they were delivering a Baby Marie for me.
I’d never heard of Baby Maries so I was really annoyed; so annoyed that I could hardly relate to the situation.
This dream is related to another dream I had once and is actually a fulfillment but why interrupt this story. If you want I can send you the other one, just ask. Well, they brought in this big barrel or keg. The barrel came apart in the middle so the upper part was slid aside. I have never seen a stranger sight. The barrel was half filled with the clearest water you ever saw. Sight for the blind you might say. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Floating, not so much in, but under the water was the head of a little infant with these large loving eyes that met mine.
I can tell you I was nonplused. ‘What’s this?’ I asked truculently enough. ‘It’s for you. We got this Baby Marie for you.’ Said my alter ego in his Hawaiian shirt. ‘It’s a Baby Marie.’
I was disgusted. The idea, putting a baby in a barrel of water and shipping it from god knows where. The poor thing would drown, should have already drowned. I almost missed my connection over past grievances and meaningless technicalities. Then I realized that if the Baby Marie was still alive she must be floating in living water. That must be why she hadn’t drowned. I knew the value of living water if I didn’t understand the importance of a Baby Marie.
page 6.
More for the sake of the living water than the Baby Marie I accepted the gift. The water and the Baby Marie were then poured into the dry well in my brain stem down below where the sea monsters go. The eyes of the Baby Marie which were so loving replaced those of my mother who had rejected me. The connection was restored.
Unable to reach the problem through conscious Depth Psychology my mind had nevertheless found a way to resolve the dilemma. Or, perhaps problems of the brain stem function independently of the methods of Depth Psychology.
That’s how the Baby Marie came to live me completely changing my life. That’s why I don’t and won’t drink alcohol again.
The details of the dream are not clear to me but perhaps this crowd of people at the party are the people who laid my central childhood fixation on me and are offering me compensation for their crime. I certainly can’t be sure.
I suppose it right to speculate some on who or what the Baby Marie might be. Since she is a construction of my own mind that may not be as hard as it may seem.
Obviously with the Baby Marie I am born again. In fact, I had been reading Jung and I was struck by his analysis of the bapismal font and the idea of the infant being born again in that holy or living water.
I had also read of a dream of Bob Hunter’s, the song writer for the Grateful Dead, you know. He had a recurrent dream that terrified him for days after. In his dream he went down to the lowest place in the world where he stood before a black muddy river. I had no trouble recognizing this river as a symbol for his relationship with his mother. I also knew that it would take more than a box of rain to unsully those waters, but if he knew how to use the box of rain it would be a good start especially if the rain was living water. You see, he had the problem and the solution in his mind all along.
page 7.
Last and perhaps most important is a song that had been playing in my memory for over fifty years. It was a song about a man trying to reach a person over the phone known only as Marie.
He knows neither her phone number nor her address. He pleads desperately with the operator to help him get in touch with his Marie. The operator cannot help him even though the man explains quite explicitly that Marie lives only half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge in Memphis, Tennessee. As it turned out Marie was merely an infant.
I had fixated on Marie, the Mississippi Bridge, the Mississippi River and Memphis, Tennessee all my life without realizing why. Why I should have done so is not clear to me. How I might have associated my unrealized problem with an inexplicable answer is a mystery of the mind, yet both problem and answer were ever present in my mind just as they were in Bob Hunter’s.
It took several decades to cross that bridge over the river but at last I have gotten in touch with my Marie.
This is a true story. You may believe it or not as you choose, but if you heed it you will find it a major contribution to the understanding of human psychology as well as your own.
That’s all I have to say. I bid you goodnight. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Don’t wait up.
Afterword.
Dr. Polarion can be cantankerous at times. Don’t let his attitude in this relation fool you. He’s actually a nice guy, not as cranky as he allowed himself to sound. He’s a pretty deep psychologist, kind of look through and behind his narration. I mean, you know, he’s got literary ambitions. Wants to be another Freud. Get the Nobel prize for literature.
As a more gradual transition to Part III let me lead you through the art gallery of the mind to the Salvador Dali Room. Over on this wall here, look at this picture called ‘The Temptation Of Saint Anthony.’ This was done in 1946. I’m not sure of Dali’s sources. For all I know he may have been reading Poe.
Look down here in the corner at the naked Saint Anthony recoiling on the ground from the horse figure, holding out his cross to exorcise the demon. See that skull of death on the ground between his legs. Look at the rearing mare or the Mother Archetype, you can tell it’s a mare, look back between the legs, look at those horse shoes all askew on those enormous front feet. See those teeth showing between the parted lips, look on these baleful eyes. What could be more clear?
Then see, coming behind the Mare are the pack elephants of memory on their precarious spindly legs. Memory is like that but the bulk of the elephants is such that you know the memories must be important. The first bears a female figure on the pedestal. The Mother Archetype. See her holding up her breasts like some antique figure of Mother Earth promising all and delivering nothing. Give her a baby, that ‘s all she wants.
Behind her comes a symbol I can’t really understand. Perhaps a triangular cenotaph. I don’t know what Dali means.
Finally comes the elephant bearing the house or symbol of the self. Now, let us turn to Part III, ‘Cow Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe.’
A Mother’s Eyes
April 27, 2007
A Mother’s Eyes
by
R.E. Prindle
Part I: The Remarkable Case Of Aldous Huxley’s Eyes 30 pages
Part II: The Baby Marie: 10 pages
Part III: Cow Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe: 21 pages
Part IV: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle: 9 pages
Part I
The Remarkable Case Of Aldous Huxley’s Eyes
This essay will deal with certain unconscious relationships between the Indo-European male and the Mother Archetype. This essay is retricted to the Indo-European sub-species because the author is not convinced that all Homo Sapiens sub-species are identical in intellectual makeup nor are they subjected to the same cultural influences which would produce a uniform effect across all sub-species of mankind. What Jung calls the Collective Unconscious of Man does not use the same symbolism in every period of time, every place and with all sub-species. While the Horse will be a central focus of the Indo-European after minus 2000, for instance, prior to its introduction to the Middle East the beast could not have figured in the Collective Unconscious of either the Indo-Europeans or Semitic Mesopotamians. Thus the Black, Semitic and Mongolid sub-species may be subject to the same relationship with the Mother Archetype but may express the same issue in different symbolism.
page 1.
The female of the Indo-European or other sub-species is structurally different from the male hence subject to different responses to the same issue in different symbolism. I will touch on that briefly in Part IV.
Further, one ought not to confuse the role of female with the role of mother. The female is a different person until she becomes a mother. Once a mother her response to the role will depend on female societal desires which will control her attitude to motherhood. The intelligence and intellectuality of the female person is in conflict with the Structural Psychology of the Mother. Not all females are intellectually adapted to become mothers although most do become mothers.
The topic will be approached from the point of view of Depth Psychology based more on the approach of Carl G. Jung than that of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s approach was based on the personal psychology of the upper brain while Jung approached the subject more from a Special angle hence his notion of the Collective Unconscious with a universal heritable symbolism regardless of education or sub-species.
Because he was dealing with a more homogeneous population unlike the heterogeneous population of the United States he was able to believe that all people are subjected to identical influences even though he had the obvious sub-special differences of the Jewish Semitics before him.
page 2.
There can of course be no such thing as a collective mind hence no Collective Unconscious. Neither can this Collective Unconscious be inherited. There can only be a shared sub-special understanding of phenomena. This shared understanding will express itself in certain common symbols induced by a universal field of education depending on one’s level of consciousness.
Specifically I wish to examine the relationship between the mother and the eyes of the Indo-European male as well as the mother’s identification with the Horse by the male. All three are intimately related.
The difference between Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the individual unconscious or, rather, sub-conscious, is that Jung without having actually differentiated the two was referring to Structural Psychology by his notion of the Collective Unconscious.
Before the human organism can be subject to personal psychology there must first be an organism. The construction of that organism will then determine its psychological potential.
Thus while all the higher vertebrates share the same Structural Psychology the addition of the upper brain separates man from the beasts while causing a conflict between the Structural Psychology and Personal or Intellectual Pyschology.
While a human entity appears to be an organic whole it is actually a construction of component parts. The nature of those parts determine the psychological potential of the completed construction.
page 3.
Not enough attention has been paid to how a human is constructed or the signficance of that construction. The basic organism seems to be taken for granted.
The human is a combination of two different components which are then integrated. On the one hand there is the passive ovum which is provided by the female of the species; on the other hand is the active sperm provided by the male. Passivity and activity are important and should not be passed over lightly. The ovum provides one half of the structural elements as well as all the mitochondrial DNA. These are significant facts and not merely incidental.
The ovum is always female or an X chromosome. Thus the male always has this female X chromosome component which Jung and Freud using the imperfect data of their time referred to as a man’s ‘feminine side.’ Jung called it the Anima in the male, the corresponding role in the female the Animus.
The presence of an X chromosome in the male in no way affects his sexual identity as a male. It is not a cause of homosexuality or effeminacy. Using the imperfect data of his time Jung acted on the notion that sexuality was caused by a ‘preponderance’ of male or female genes. This would of course distort his vision of sexuality creating non-existent possibilities.
An unfertilized ovum is, of course, of no value. The male provides the fertilizing element in the form of the sperm. The sperm contains the other half of the structure which when joined with the ovum completes the structure.
page 4.
The sperm can be either X or y. There must be a difference in nature between the ovate and spermatic X chromosomes. If X the completed structure is a female. But the spermatic X contributes the gene pool of the mother of the male which is part of the Anima so that the female has two female components. Without the X chromosome the male could not provide X sperm.
It must also be true that the spermatic side of the female provides a set of genes received from the father while the ovate side provides a set of genes from the mother, so that not all of the female’s ovum are the same.
In the case of either an X or y sperm the ovate or female mitochondrial DNA is always and solely the source of mitochondrial DNA in the resulting construction whether male or female. The Spermatic mitochondrial DNA is always expelled from the united ovum.
Thus the Mother Archetype establishes itself in a much more intimate connection with the male than the Father Archetype. This is a physiological fact with real consequences and not a matter for sexual pride.
When the ovate and spermatic parts combine the ovate X chromosome assumes the left side of the structure while the spermatic X or y forms the right.
Many organs which can function independently are therefore duplicated such as kidneys, lungs, gonads or ovaries. Those which can only function as a unit are formed of two separate lobes which are seamed such as the heart, liver, penis or clitoris.
Now, this may be controversial but the gonads or ovaries, the spinal cords and brain from an integrated unit like the power train of the automobile. All three are parts of consciousness.
page 5.
The ends of the spinal cords, it follows that one each must be provided by the ovum and sperm, anchored in the gonads or ovaries intertwine up the spine until they cross over at the brain stem so that the passive ovate left side of the body becomes the passive right side of the brain while the active spermatic right side of the body crosses over to become the active left side of the brain.
The two cords, spermatic and ovate anchored in the gonads or ovaries pass up the spine to emerge from the brain stem as ‘loose wires.’ To give them a name we will use Jung’s terminology but assert that male and female have both an Animus and Anima rather than as Jung has it, the male an Anima and the female an Animus.
Now, as man evolved he began with what is referred to as the serpent’s brain or the brain stem followed by mid- brain, parietal lobes, upper brain and pre-frontal lobe.
Thus structurally to the point of the brain stem all vertebrates function more or less identically. By which I mean to say that to that point the psychology of say, sub-species five of the lion is identical to man. If this isn’t true than evolution is bunk.
Of necessity the optical nerves are associated with this very primitive organ of the brain stem. This fact must have some relation to the association of the Mother with the eyes.
Such a psychological association must operate independently of personal psychology as Structural Psychology or, as Jung would have it, the Collective Unconscious.
page 6.
There are then tree levels of consciousness: the autonomic system, the brain stem and the upper brain.
In fact the as the brain stem is not intellectual as in personal psychology, it may function independently of the upper brain and require a different technique for therapy.
At any rate the symbolism Jung discusses is related to Structural Psychology and not the neuroses and psychoses of personal psychology.
When the male Indo-European experiences rejection or abandonment by the mother this rejection may be evidenced by eye problems associated with a horse symbolism.
Having laid the frame for my discussion I wish to begin with the case of Aldous Huxley, his relationship to his mother and his celebrated eye problems. Aldous Huxley is, of course, the important literary figure who wrote ‘Brave New World’, ‘Eyeless In Gaza’, ‘Point Counter Point’ and other intriguing and important novels.
All his adult life from the age of sixteen on Huxley endured terrible problems with his eyes. He was frequently able to improve his vision remarkably only to suffer setbacks. He first suffered maternal rejection when his mother opened a girl’s school relegating Huxley to an inferior status in both his and her eyes to her female students. This alone had a permanent effect on his character and his adult relationship with women. Then, when Huxley was fourteen his mother died abandoning him completely as it were.
page 7.
No matter how natural or unavoidable death may be, those affected are under no obligation to react rationally. While on a conscious or even sub-conscious level Huxley seemed to handle his mother’s death well he was devastated on the structural level. First rejected and then abandoned by his mother, Huxley, at the age of sixteen was attacked in his eyes. Actually the reaction could have been predicted although how and when would have had to await manifestation.
Huxley developed an inflammation of the cornea called Keratitis Punctata. Thus his reaction to his mother’s rejection and abandonment was of the most serious sort. In the days before modern medicine he would have successfully blinded himself in both eyes. Given the medicine of the day he might have been cured with minimal or no loss of vision. As it was he was misdiagnosed allowing the disease to take almost full course. By the time he was treated he had lost his vision in his right or ovate eye while being as good as blind in his left or spermatic eye.
The nature of Keratitis Punctata is such that it damages or scars the surface of the cornea while the internal functions of the eye remain intact. The effect of the scar tissue allowed his vision to fluctuate.
I think that if a survey were taken it would be found that the right or ovate eye is always affected the worst. This would strengthen my contention that certain eye problems are due to relationships with the mother or ovate side.
It may be argued that Keratitis Punctata is a physical problem and not subject to psycho-somatic influence. It is my contention that Huxley’s psyche in search of a satisfactory ailment subconsciously sought the affliction out.
page 8.
Over the years Huxley was able by an act of will to improve his vision dramatically but he always suffered relapses as his structural need for the infirmity overcame his conscious will. While had he been diagnosed and treated promptly he would not have lost his vision still his Structural need was such that he would have had a continuing series of eye problems over his lifetime.
Medical science poses problems to psychotic needs by being able to overcome psych-somatic reactions; the sub-conscious must search for new ways to gratify its need for affliction.
I too suffered abandonment by my mother beginning when I was five and ending when I was ten when she remarried. I was first put into two foster homes and then placed in an orphanage. The orphanage was critical. While I had very acute vision until I was forty a variety of eye problems have plagued me since.
While all the problems were quite natural therefore seeming to be of a strictly physical nature yet I had been plagued by fears of going blind since I was ten when my mother remarried. I therefore left myself open to attack in the appropriate time and place. Finally at sixty-four I had a cataract operation on my right or ovate eye followed by one on the left. I realized the psycho-somaic source of the problem while I was reading Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley.
page 9.
Prompted by the reading I had a dream of a horse. This is the only horse dream I can remember ever having.
The horse clearly represented my mother staring at me with large guilty eyes not unlike the description of the Greek goddess Hera who was styled ‘cow-eyed.’
Sometime in the near past, two or more years ago, I had seen a TV show about a horse trainer who I can remember only by the name of the Horse Whisperer. He had developed a new technique of gentling a horse rather than breaking it. In my dream I was using his technique to gentle a mare. She seemed to want to be affectionate to me but I kept pushing her away or she shied away in my attempt to gentle her.
By that time I had already developed my ideas of Structural Psychology. I had also integrated my personality clearing all fixations from my subconscious. As I expressed it then, all the way down to my brain stem. Now I realized I was dealing with the brain stem itself having spoken more truly than I knew.
While I had made progress in rectifying my Animus I cannot say for certain that the process was complete. In all probability I have reconciled my Anima and Animus. I have never had trouble with my Anima although my Animus was seriously blunted as a child affecting my ability to express my manhood.
However, contrary to Depth Pschology, having recognized and spoken this apparent fixation caused by my mother’s abandonment the fixation did not respond by immediately being exorcised as had my fixations of the upper brain. Thus the problem of Structural traumas obviously requires a different technique for treatment.
page 10.
The appearance of a horse figure in my dream was startling to me. I have never liked horses. All my life I have had an irrational hatred of them even to the point of verbally abusing them at sight.
Aldous Huxley, characteristically of the trauma, expressed his own reaction through horse imagery. Huxley wrote his first novel ‘Crome Yellow’ in 1921 followed by ‘Antic Hay’ in 1923 and ‘Those Barren Leaves’ in 1925. Those three novels lead up to 1928’s ‘Point Counter Point’ in which his problem with his mother finds expression in varied symbolism. In this last novel Huxley portrays himself in the character of Philip Quarles. He has a wife, Elinor, as a mother substitute and a son called signficantly, Little Phil, in other words a doppelganger.
In the novel Quarles has a limp rather than bad eyes. Huxley, through Quarles, expresses his mother’s abandonment and his attack of Kertitis Punctata this way:
Quote:
‘…Philip…was remembering that immense black horse kicking, plunging, TEETH bared and ears laid back; and how it suddenly leaped forward, dragging the carter along with it: and the rumble of the wheels; and ‘Aie!’ his own screams; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.’
page 11.
Note expecially the teeth which will appear more prominently in Part III.
This very vivid picture is done so well that one might actually believe such an event really occurred. It didn’t. Here Huxley transforms his mother into a huge black horse. The steep bank I interpret as the brain stem which appeared in my own imagery as a deep dry well. There was a huge shape between Huxley/Quarles and the sun which must represent both the loss of his mother, when the sun went out of his life, and the onset of Kerititis Punctata.
In the novel Quarles had his leg crushed by the cart but in this version it is not clear where he received the injury while it was definitely caused by the huge black horse. There was only the annihilating pain. One assumes that the pain was the loss of Huxley’s mother.
Huxley gives his hurt a full scale treatment here. Quarles and his wife live in a mews in London. A mews is a converted stable. Horses had formerly been kept there. Now the ‘huge machines’ or cars of a hundred horse power or more are kept there. The arch at the end of the mews through which the horses were led stands as a constant reminder to Huxley/Quarles of his tragedy.
Not content to retell his own pain, Huxley then goes on to punish his mother in his imagination as he feels she punished him by dying. Remember a man in Huxley’s situation uses a woman as a surrogate to avenge himself on his mother who is beyond retaliation. In ‘Point Counter Point’ Quarles’ mother is still alive. It is she who has care of Little Phil when he is stricken with meningitis so the guilt remains with her.
page 13.
On the eve of the meningitis attack Elinor Quarles, Little Phil’s mother, was about to commence a dalliance with another man. Quarles’ mother’s telegram reached Elinor in time to prevent her beginning the affair. Elinor believes that Little Phil’s meningitis was caused by her intended infidelity and suffers accordingly.
Elinor’s intended infidelity corresponds with Huxley’s mother’s betrayal of her love for him by relegating him to a secondary role while she lavished attention on her girl students.
Huxley’s descriptions of Little Phil’s suffering are quite gruesome.
Quote:
‘…she found the child already awake. One eyeball was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.
‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s paralyzed.”
Unquote.
Thus the crux of Point Counter Point is the punishment of Elinor Quarles qua Huxley’s mother for the crime of rejecting him in favor of her female students and later dying. Huxley quite rightly associates eye disease with his mother through his wifely surrogate and the symbol of the giant black horse with giant hooves and teeth bared rearing in the brain stem. He obviously had no clear idea of what this imagery meant to him personally. No doors of perception were opened for him there.
page 13.
While this horse imagery is clear in ‘Point Counter Point’ Bedford also quotes Huxley as noting emphatically the remarkable deeds of horses in Homer’s Iliad. I think the horse symbol is replaced in a man’s active life by his relationship with women.
I now intend to devote a few pages to the relationship of mothers and women to horses and eyes in Greek mythology leading back to the present time.
My two lines of argument will concentrate on the nature of the God of Waters, Poseidon and the relationship of that greatest of all mama’s boys, Achilles, with his mother, the sea nymph, Thetis.
I follow the Jungian concept of attempting to penetrate the symbolism by this narrative of action.
In the divine dispensation of spoils in Greek mythology the preeminent god, Zeus, was awarded the sky, Poseidon preeminence in the oceans and rivers, Hades possession of the underworld. Obviously Hades got skunked which made him a sour sort of guy.
The surface of Mother Earth was common to all three.
The significant fact here is that the three gods are male while the Earth named Ge, Gaia or Demeter was female. Thus you have three men with equal claims to the same woman, Mother Earth.
In ancient Greek sourcs as well as in Biblical story Man realized that there was a time before consciousness. Thus the story of the creation of the universe is less a story of creation than one of the crystallization of consciousness.
page 14.
In the creation myth all objective reality is confused; all is seen as one. In other words, there was only an animal consciousness. Then a divine wind blows across the plane of consciousness separating the upper and lower spheres; the conscious and subconscious. Thus the upper sphere of consciousness became heaven and was allotted to the mind of infinite power, Zeus. The subconscious was given to the Father of Waters, Poseidon while the underworld of the brain stem went to Hades. The plane of consciousness was shared by mankind and the gods. This is as it should be.
Poseidon’s dominion is the seas, oceans and rivers. The waters of oblivion are associated with the subconscious and irrational which is to say the female or matriarchal consciousness. The subconscious and irrational are therefore equated with the matriarchal order. Thus Poseidon, who must actually predate Zeus as a carryover from the Matriarchal consciousness has relations with a number of domineering women who are very hard on men.
The question of why Poseidon is also closely related to horses is very difficult to answer, especially as Poseidon was early on the scene while horses arrived later. I offer only a working hypothesis.
It has been suggested that the rollers of the sea are reminiscent of horses’ heads. It has also been suggested that rivers as they dash down mountain slopes and race to the sea are quite similar to the flight of the horse. There may be truth in both suggestions as when the horse arrived it had to be associated with some god; in association with Poseidon that may possibly explain how horses came to be associated with the Mother Archetype. Their association with the Mother can only have begun after the Indo-Europeans brought horses to the Aegean world which was after the year minus 2000.
page 15.
Of the mean flesh eating mares or mothers with whom Poseidon is associated it is only necessary to give two examples. The most important of the two by far is the Medusa and her Gorgon sisters, the other is the enchantress, Circe.
The Medusa is a very important study. She apparently dates back to an early period of the Matriarchate. While in the Patriarchic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon she is a hideous evil witch whose mere glance can turn a man to stone there is evidence to point to a time before the rise of the Patriarchate when she was a belle ideal; a tower of strength. Shields with the Medusa head continued to be used in classical times as a magical charm to repel the enemy. The snakes which form her hair were once a symbol of her authority rather than hideous emblems of hatred. She was then one of Poseidon’s wives or , more probably, he was her consort.
When the Patriarchate displaced the Matriarchate Perseus was chosen to destroy the Medusa or, in other words, the symbol of the Matriarchate. This he did by decapitation. Decapitation or the separation of the head from the body is a powerful symbol in itself which should have destroyed the Medusa’s power to lithicize men with her EYES. Even in death, which is to say after the power of the Matriarchate was broken, the mere sight of her now dead eyes continued to turn men to stone.
page 16.
The myth of Perseus is a keystone story that tells of the birth of the new order of the Patriarchate. When the old order of the Matriachate was beheaded a remarkable thing happened; two beings that correspond to the male Anima and Animus emerged from her neck or, shall we say, brain stem.
The Animus of the liberated Patriarchate was represented by the Golden Knight named Chrysaor. As the Animus he had no concrete identity. He represented the mind of infinite power and rationality possessed by Zeus and shared by men but not by women. He consequently fades from view.
The Anima that sprang from Medusa’s severed brain stem was the great winged horse or mare, Pegasus. The great mare allowed man’s imagination to soar as though godlike, above the earth’s plane that was the dominion of the Matriarchate.
Further having now passed through the dawn of consciousness as represented by the creation myth the male had now reached the level of consciousness where he could begin to attack and destroy his subconscious demons. Thus Perseus finds the maiden Andromeda chained to a rock awaiting destruction by the monster of the sea depths of the subconscious.
Soaring above the Leviathan on his Anima, Pegasus, in the conscious sphere, Perseus is able to destroy the monster of the subconscious and liberate Andromeda, or the female, from destruction by the subconscious. In his arms, under his protection Andromeda, or the female, was freed from animalism. She too was released to find her full potential under men’s guidance and protection.
page 17.
As decapitation wasn’t totally effective there was more than one way to handle the attempted suppression of the Matriarchate. It has been truly said that you can kill men but you can’t kill ideas. Perhaps because of the Iliad with its gathering of the tribes at Troy one thinks of Greek mythology as an indissoluble whole. This is not the case. There are many strands and traditions to Greek mythology.
It is highly probable that when the Greeks invaded the Peninsula that their route bypassed Athens which was shielded from above by the Boeotian Semites. Thus the Greeks were shunted West where they fell on the Pelopponesus bypassing Attica.
While the Athenians avoided military invasion they were yet unable to resist the Patriarchal tide.
The myth of Perseus and the Gorgon which belongs to the Argive or Pelopponesian cycle gives only one view of the suppression of the Matriarchate. That was how it happened West of Attica. In Athens itself the transition from the Matriarchate to the Patriarchate was more evolutionary. This would be the result of being bypassed by the Greek invasion.
Perseus on his way back to Argos from Palestine gave the Medusa’s head to Athene who then wore it as an emblem on her bosom. This would be another way of saying that Perseus influenced the Athenians to convert to Patriarchalism.
page 18.
I would suggest that, even though the Iliad lists a contingent of Athenian ships present at Troy, there were no Athenians there. As the Greek heroes for the most part are from the Pelopponese or other Greek locations and the quarrel is between them and Troy while none of the Greek heroes was Athenian. I would suggest that the Athenian contingent is an interpolation. Agamemnon and the Argives as invaders would have had no influence over non-Greek Athens such as they had over Odysseus in Ithaca.
The Athenians always claimed to be an autocthonous people, that is that they sprang from the soil or, in other words, were there before the Greek invasion. Of necessity that would mean that they were not Greek per se.
Their early heroes are half snake, half human, which I understand to mean that on the one hand as snakes emerge from the soil the Athenians were autocthonous; on the other hand that they were half Matriarchal and half Patriarchal. In other words, there was an evolutionary transition. This idea is borne out by subsequent Athenian mythology.
If this is true then it must follow that the gods of Athens had formerly been Medusa and Poseidon- the Queen and her consort.
Imagine Perseus handing the head of Medusa to Athene. Athene must have neutralized the power of Medusa because as of the handing of the head to Athene it was still capable of turning men to stone at a glance. As Athene’s emblem displayed on her breast where all men must see it, it could no longer do so.
As the Athenians told the story of the suppression of the Matriarchate, Zeus swallowed a matriarchal goddess known as Metis. This is a normal method of disposing of one’s enemies. As the Africans down to the present day say when they intend to destroy an enemy- We will eat you up.
page 19.
When you eat someone up you obtain their qualities. Metis was the goddess of Wisdom. Whether she was one of the Gorgons I don’t believe is recorded but I suspect so. Perseus and the more primitive Argives believed that destruction was simply a matter of cutting off a head, the Gordian knot approach. The Athenians thought differently.
Having eaten up the Matriarchy Zeus found that it gave him a serious case of indigestion. His eyes were bigger than his stomach. The Matriarchy would not stay suppressed.
As it was necessary that some other expedient be employed the Matriarchy was allowed to exist but only as subordinate to the Patriarchy. While not abolished, the Patriarchy attempted to reform it in an acceptable way. The attempt was made to replace the uncontrollable Matriarchal figures as represented by Ares and Aphrodite with a more rational goddess embracing both.
Thus the indigestion of Zeus gave him a headache. In other words, he had to give the problem some serious thought. He had an idea, as why wouldn’t the mind of infinite power have an idea. He transformed the old wild undisciplined Matriarchal god and goddess into the superbly rational and controlled Athene. Her idea formed in the Patriarchal brain then sprang fully formed and armed from Zeus’ forehead. Actually she didn’t spring but was chiseled out by Hermes and Hephaestus who are both gods of resource.
Thus when Perseus handed the head of Medusa to Athene he was passing the torch for the application of Patriarchy in Athens. The destruction of Poseidon’s consort in Athens left that god without a female counterpart and that’s the way he stays throughout the Patriarchate. Athene was a chaste virgin who would have nothing to do with men. As a goddess with a technological sideline she came into conflict with the Matriarchal technological god Hephaestus. He attempted to rape her or in other words reimpose an aspect of the matriarchy on her which she successfully resisted. Instead he spurted on her leg in a pre-mature ejaculation which she, as the goddess of weaving, wiped off with a piece of wool.
page 20.
Unable to seduce Athene and reestablish his supremacy in Athens on his part, Poseidon then had a contest with Athene to see who should be the tutelary deity of Athens. In other words, should Athens be Patriarchally or Matriarchally inclined. Should it be named Athens or Poseidonia?
Poseidon peformed the seemingly impossible task of making water spring from the rocky high crown of the Acropolis. Athene countered by making an olive tree grow on Rocky Top.
The Athenians opted for the olive tree but it was not a clean cut victory for the modified Patriarchy. The Athenians ever after nurtured several snakes on the Acropolis along with both the olive tree and Poseidon’s spring. Thus the Matriarchal past was not forgotten.
Further Athene retained some attributes of the Matriarchy. She was sometimes theriomorphically represented with a horse’s head while her attribute of the owl is represented in statuary and she is referred to as owl eyed, undoubtedly a reference to the wise Metis. A snake was also shown coiled on the ground in the shelter of Athene’s shield as she leaned on it.
page 21.
In point of fact all Greek heroes were symbolically horse headed by virtue of the horse hair crests on their helmets. They were always under the protection of the Mother Archetype while sharing in the qualities of her symbol the horse.
The wearing of lion and leopard skins is also an aspect of theriomorphism. Obviously one hopes to share in the prowess of the lion or leopard by wearing its skin. Thus Heracles armored himself in the skin of the Nemean Lion which, in itself, was a symbol of the Matriarchy.
I hope this exposition established the nature of the relationship between the Mother, horse, eyes and the brain stem to the Son in ancient Greek thought. These are not irrelevant details of myths but important symbols when understood in the Jungian sense. The Ancients were not just amusing themselves with strange tales. The message for the initiate is different for that of the hoi polloi.
The myth of Circe explains what happened under the Matriarchate when men allowed themselves to be dominated by their carnal desires. It is only when one controls one’s sexual needs that one escapes domination by the female to dominate the female. In that way one rises from the level of the beast to that of a man. Nor is this ‘repression’ in the Freudian sense.
Before attacking the issue of Achilles and Thetis let me point out the significance of Oedipus. Oedipus was abandoned as an infant by his mother Queen Jocasta of Thebes. On his way to Thebes as a young man he was jostled out of the road by a chariot and a team of horses. Enraged he killed the driver who he later learned was his father. By killing this man, who was king of Thebes, he made the widowed queen his wife. He then learned that she was his mother. Horrified at the thought of having married his mother he gouged his EYES out using the clasp of a woman’s dress. Thus one has son, mother’s abandonment, horses and eyes.
Achilles, on the contrary, had an excellent relationship with his mother, too good. He remained tied to her apron strings all his short life.
His mother, Thetis, is one of the more interesting mythological characters. Zeus had it mind to make Thetis his own but backed away when he learned that she would bear a son who would be greater than his father. No god would then touch her so she was married to the mortal, Peleus, to whom she bore Achilles.
Thetis and Peleus lived apart. As she was a Nereid or sea nymph, closely related to Poseidon or the subconscious, she lived at the bottom of the sea whence she always made sure that Achilles had a superior team of horses, fabulous armor and an incredible shield. Thus while Achilles was a formidable warrior his success depended as much on his doting mother as it did his own prowess.
It was fated that Achilles could have a short life if sought glory on the field of battle or a long life as sort of an effeminate mama’s boy. You see, the relationship to the mother. This was his and his mother’s dilemma in the Iliad.
To protect her boy as long as she could Thetis had him reared among the girls in the girl’s quarters in girl’s clothes. He was so good at female impersonation that when the Greeks sought him out to serve in the war it was impossible to identify this giant amongst men among the girls.
Think about this.
page 23.
Still it was reputed that he was a mighty warrior who was destined to defeat the Trojans. He should have had such a physique that he stood out head and shoulders above the girls.
When the Trojan War began his mother desperately wanted to keep him out of harm’s way among the girls. Odysseus, surnamed the Wily, smoked him out by raising an alarm. While the girls ran screaming Achilles true to his heroic nature seized his arms to meet the threat thus betraying his identity. Abandoning his transvestism Achilles is conscripted into Agamemnon’s Folly.
Quite frankly the Greeks have been coerced into a war for the sole benefit of the Brothers Atrides. What did Achilles care if Paris abducted Menelaus’ wife. She went with him willingly anyway. Menelaus behaved like a fool in leaving the guest Paris in his house with Helen while he left on a business trip. Would you do that? I wouldn’t.
Nevertheless Agamemnon was the sole representative of Zeus on Earth; he ruled by divine right. Zeus had given him the nod to assure victory. In point of fact he couldn’t lose. One wonders what would have happened if he had refused to help himself. How would Zeus have affected victory as the gods help only those who help themselves?
Homer in his brilliance depicts a very detailed picture of this society. Agamemnon is especially suited to command although he is not the greatest of the heroes nor a totally admirable man. In fact, his pettiness injures Achilles to the point where the latter must make a retort.
page 24.
Achilles’ first thought is to take arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous Agamemnon but Athene counsels him to suffer that particular sea of troubles in his mind. Achilles heeds her advice and goes into a pout befitting this greatest of mama’s boys. He self-centeredly withdraws himself and his troops from the war.
This act is very serious as he is the greatest of all Greek warriors while it is a known fact that the Greek’s can’t win without him. Now, Achilles has some serious mental problems. After his alter ego, Patroclus, is killed Achilles opines:
…O Zeus and Athena and Apollo
If only death would take every Trojan
And all the Achaeans except for us two,
So we alone might win that Sacred City…
That’s a prayer he hopes will be anwered. In his anger and spite he even wants his own side to be defeated and destroyed so long as he and his friend alone find salvation in that Sacred City. The City Of God?
After being robbed of his prize by Agamemnon he goes to the seashore to summon his mom from the deeps. Arising from the sea of the subconscious she comes to him. The result of this interview between a doting mother and a spoiled rotten son defies all concepts of morality both in Achilles’ request and his mother’s response.
page 25.
Achilles asks his mother to intervene for him with Zeus to cause the slaughter of the Greeks until they are fighting the Trojans among their ships in the camp. There is nothing that Thetis won’t do for her boy no matter how criminal. She is willing that the Greeks be destroyed if that is what her son wants. Thetis and Ma Barker would have gotten along just fine.
Not only did Zeus have a soft spot for Thetis but in a past time when the gods rebelled and had overpowered Zeus in an attempt to depose him Thetis had come to his rescue. Zeus owed her one.
Zeus and the gods are away in Ethiopia for twelve days but she promises her son to visit him him as soon as he returns. On his return she implored Zeus by grasping his knees with her left arm, Homer is explicit, thereby immobilizing him with her feminine side, with her right hand she grasps his chin arresting his attention. She implores him to smite the Greeks unto death to appease her son’s sense of affront.
Understand the enormity of Achilles’ request to his mother. She does not reprove him in the least instead she rushes off to Zeus for his complicity which Zeus in his profundity of mind grants.
Nor is this an easy thing to fit into his schedule. He has already given the nod to Agamemnon which must be fulfulled while he can refuse nothing to his Grecophile daughter Athene and also while he is being badgered by his wife Hera to favor the Greeks.
In the face of all these conflicting demands even though he has given the nod of victory to Agamemnon and once his nod has been given his decision cannot be altered he agrees to at least hurt the Greeks for the benefit of Thetis’ son with no possible reward for himself from Thetis as her sexual favors would cost him Olympus. Now you know what a mind of infinite power is capable of.
page 26.
Zeus then unleashes Hector and his Trojans until they breach the Greek walls firing a number of ships.
Still unrelenting, Achilles refuses to help but does allow his faggot, Patroclus, to don his armor frightening the Trojans into thinking Achilles has entered the fray. Patroclus exceeds his authority being killed by Hector who appropriates the splendid armor of Achilles as well as those great horses.
Now horseless, armorless, shieldless and friendless, in other words completely defenseless and emasculated, Achilles runs once again to mom. Mama is always there for her boy. Now, for those of us whose moms have not always been there for us this is a cause of deep envy and anguish. She promises to have the technological god, Hephaestus, make him a new shield and armor to be ready the NEXT DAY. Even Hephaestus is not too busy for this paragon of mothers; he sets aside all else and gets down to it. You see what a good relationship between mother and son is worth.
Aldous Huxley thought about such matters deeply. He never consciously associated his mother with his eyes although his attachment was such that he said that if you wanted to know how polite educated people of his mother’s time spoke his speech was a living example. In other words he thought that he emulated his mother down to her speech patterns. In essence he had become his mother.
page 27.
He had been unable to penetrate his ‘unconscious’ but he had studied the subject carefully. Sybille Bedford quotes his thoughts on the unconscious in which Huxley says that, obviously, Freud did not invent psychology or even the ‘unconscious.’ Huxley discusses a book by one F.W.H. Myers who laid out a theory of the unconscious in a book titled ‘Human Personality’ in 1886.
Myers dealth with the Homeric concepts of the unconscious qualities of Ate and Menos. Ate was the destructive or dark side or the unconscious while Menos was the creative or positive side.
Freud appropriated the concept of the unconscious but only the dark or destructive aspect appealed to him so he went no further than that.
Obviously Huxley realized subconsciously that with his mother’s eyes he was in a constant struggle between Ate and Menos, darkness and light.
It has always troubled me as to why Hephaestus, or Menos, was married to Aphrodite, or Ate and why the goddess of love and god of technology should live at the bottom of the sea.
If you remember Aphrodite arose from the sea as a sea foam riding on the half shell. Obviously love has all the substance of foam while seeing only one half of the truth. This is a form of Ate.
She and her husband live at the bottom of the sea because they represent Ate and Menos which reside in the subconscious.
page 28.
Aphrodite as Ate is so thoughtless and self-indulgent that she causes pain to everyone in her willfulness. Hephaestus was not too pleased to be awarded Aphrodite as his wife by the council of the gods. No sooner were the two married than, while Hephaestus was off on business, Aphrodite invited her natural complementary aspect of the subconscious Ate, Ares, to bed.
Aphrodite and Ares are the two parts of destructive Ate. When they are caught by Hephaestus in union they form the ‘beast with two backs’ or, in other words, they hatched from the same egg. As unreasoning hatred and love they are Ate in its complete form or aspect of the subconscious that Freud chose to exploit with much less subtlety.
Hephaestos is Menos, the god of invention and technology, also seems to send his good ideas up from the subconscious. Ideas just seem to occur to us. Hephaestus as Menos therefore resides at the bottom of the sea where he is in close contact with the Mother Archetype in the brain stem in union with Aphrodite and Ares as Ate.
It should be remembered that the mother of Hephaestus is Hera who give birth to him parthenogenously. Hephaestus has no connection with the Father Archetype. In fact, he was thrown out of heaven by Zeus. Thus Achilles’ mother is able to obtain from him whatever she wishes at a moment’s notice.
Being in close contact with the Father of Waters, Poseidon, Thetis is able to procure the finest horses for her boy. Achilles has a team that is the envy of both Greece and Troy. It goes without saying that he has no trouble with his eyes.
page 29.
The imagery of mother, horse and eyes has persisted in the Indo-European male down to the present. Let us give two examples here with more to follow in Parts III and IV. Bear in mind that the imagery is subconscious so that it is not necessary for an author to knowingly select his imagery.
In Rudyard Kipling’s novel ‘The Light That Failed; the hero, Dick, was an orphan who was placed in a foster home with an orphan girl, Maisie. There were very close as children, one might say that she became Dick’s mother surrogate, but they became separated going about their careers apart.
They met again as adults in London where Dick has his attachment to Maisie renewed although in an irrational manner while she only reluctantly acknowledges him ultimately rejecting his attentions at which point Dick loses his sight.
Kipling doesn’t make the connection between mother’s abandonment, Maisie’s rejection and Dick’s eyes but it must be there in his subconscious.
Dick, a war correspondent, returns to a war in the Sudan as a blind newspaper correspondent. Traveling through hostile territory, just as he reaches the safety of the British camp he is shot dead off, not a horse, but a camel.
The second example is the play and movie Equus by Peter Shaffer. I saw only the movie. The plot centers around the psycho-analysis of the male figure. The story concerns a stable boy who blinds the mares under his care by slicing their eyes. Whether based on a true analysis or not Shaffer has a very confused presentation of his ideas which he probaby does not understand.
page 30.
As the protagonist is a stable boy it follows that he was drawn subconsciously to the job to be around horses indicating a weak mother relationship. That he sought a job in a stable to be around horses is a subconscious indication of his pain. We have seen what a doting mother, Thetis did for her boy Achilles and conversely what happened to Oedipus.
The mother substitute appears in a girl who seduces him in full sight of the horses. Unable to perform sexually in full sight of the horses, or Mother Archetype, he revenges himself on his mother by blinding the horses.
It is only speculation but I infer that the stable boy had been rejected, abandoned psychologically or both by his mother causing a deep abiding anger. It is forbidden to retaliate one’s rage on the mother so he vented his anger on both a young woman and the mother symbol, the horse. He disappointed the girl while putting out the horse’s eyes.
The flesh eating mares of Greek mythology is a difficult image to understand but perhaps they represent filiophagus mothers who victimize their sons knowingly or unknowingly. The opposite of Thetis.
The subsequent relationship of the rejected or abandoned son to women is important. In the stable boy’s case he was impotent with women. Dick needed to affirm his relationship to a childhood mother surrogate to avoid the consequences of abandonment. In Huxley’s case he was very fortunate in recognizing a woman who would serve him as he felt his mother should have served him and in finding a woman who realized the exact need for unconditional love of a man in her own makeup.
page 31.
One hesitates to say that Huxley created conditions by which his wife would predecease him but she did. After a marriage of nearly forty years Huxley quickly married a self-sufficient woman while apprearing to be relieved at the loss of his mother surrogate.
I hope I have made the connection between mothers, horses and eyes clearly. As the problem is not in the upper brain but the brain stem the fixation cannot be voided by the normal means of identification and expression.
In my own case in attempting to resolve the matter I have taken the approach of trying to reconcile my mother’s actions with my feelings about it but I haven’t been too successful.
Obviously the primitive brain stem presents different obstacles than the mid-, upper and pre-frontal brain.
End of Part I. Go to Part II, The Baby Marie.
I, Dynamo 