The Real Story of Oedipus Rex

Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Gustave Moreau

If you ask the layman what he knows about the Oedipus story, he'll likely mention something about wanting to sleep with your mother and killing your father. Fair enough, that does happen in the story. I find, however, that the classic approach to the story is severely lacking. While Oedipus' story certainly contains a metaphor which is useful for psychoanalytic theory, it is only one part of the story. The myth does not begin and end with the desire for the mother and the fear of castration. In fact, it begins and ends with the same image: a blind seer. In order to understand Oedipus, even and especially the psychic process, we need to take the story as a whole.

The myth begins, as many do, with a prophecy. Oedipus was the newborn son of a king and queen, and, being good despots, wanted to make sure this new son wouldn't screw everything up for them. However, first we need to take a look at the prophet himself, given that the blind seer is an image that appears in both beginning and end. Oedipus' parents sought out the oracle of Delphi, although I believe it would be appropriate to consider the Theban prophet Tiresias, who is also famous for having been a woman for seven years. From Wiki:

On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese, as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick. Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus, trampled on them. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of Hesiod.

So Tiresias, having been both of sexes, was summoned when Zeus and Hera were having an argument as to whether men or women enjoyed doing it more. Tiresias declared in no uncertain terms that it was the woman. As he soon found out, though, women do not want men to know this: Hera struck him blind. Zeus, however, to make up for his lost sight, gave him the gift of prophecy. This fact will be important when we reach the end of Oedipus' story.

The king and queen went, then, to see a prophet about the new heir. This prophet told them that Oedipus would eventually murder his father and marry his mother. Evidently, the king, Laius, hadn't paid attention when his tutor told him about Chronos and Zeus, and decided that the best course of action was to simply get rid of Oedipus. Prophecies, though, are self-fulfilling: it is exactly this abandonment that will eventually lead to Oedipus murdering his father and marrying his mother. So obviously the infant survived the attempted murder, and eventually came to be adopted by the royals of a different city.

Saturno devorando a su hijo,  Francisco de Goya

This point is particularly important: I mentioned the Chronos and Zeus story because it is exactly because it was prophecied that a son of Chronos would replace him as ruler that Chronos tried to eat his children. Needless to say, that's exactly what caused Zeus' (Gaia's, really) ire. The same is true for Narcissus - check here for an in-depth look at the Narcissus myth. To me, this alludes to the idea that we are the creators of our own realities. If we interpret a myth as we interpret a dream, then all the characters in the myth are the different facets of a single psyche. It can be reasoned, then, that Tiresias is an aspect of Oedipus, meaning that it was Oedipus himself who determined his fate. The circumstances around which his early development took place are the determiners of his destiny.

Oedipus, naturally, is not an actual person, but a stand-in for man. That this story continues to be relevant thousands of years after it was first told evinces its universal character. It doesn't matter if you were born in Qing-dynasty China or in 1960s San Francisco, we humans all go through the same psychological development, but it is the very deviation from the standard development that makes us all individuals. Our parents, our communities and our cultures screw us, yes, but it was our choice to be born into those given circumstances, so the important question to ask is: why? It's a cliché that talented artists generally had rough childhoods, but it's true nonetheless. Without those misfortunes, they would have been mere cogs in the machine.

Which brings me to another important point: Oedipus is a king. At first glance, the king's job seems to be to essentially run the kingdom, and that much is true, but it goes deeper than that. The psychodynamic function of the king is to serve as example and inspiration. The king is the city-/state's source of vital energy, it is his decisions that determine the fate of the country. That is to say, the king in this sense is able to exert his free will. His subjects cannot do so, not because they have no free will, but because they haven't developed to the point that they can be responsible for thousands of others. I don't need to tell you what happens when a king doesn't serve as the moral compass of his nation: examples abound in human history.

The king represents the man with the divine conscience, with the knowledge that he is all that he is because of his own will. This man is aware of the inescapable nature of his roots, but he is also brave enough to make choices that go against his programming. Thus, the story of Oedipus is that of a man's journey to a higher counsciousness. To take it literally is making the exact mistake that Oedipus himself avoided making. We'll return to this when we get to the Sphinx.

No, that's not an empirical depiction

So Oedipus is raised in another family, but he eventually learns about the prophecy made for him. Since he thought the prophecy referred to his adoptive parents, he left the city so that no harm would come to them. For a man's life to be truly his own, he must decide to leave his parents' house, that is, to make choices that go against the desire of the family-cum-society. Whether he stays in the city or moves away is, in this context, irrelevant - what matters is the person made a choice of their own.

Naturally, however, our past comes to confront us. As we grow, we come to realise that though we have left our parents' house, our parents have never left us. After all, the way we do things was learned exactly by repeating what our parents themselves did, on many levels. As a matter of fact, leaving your parents' house, metaphorically speaking (but remember the whole point here is that everything is a metaphor), is a way of protecting them, because just as we need to develop from youth to adulthood, so do they need to develop from middle age to old age, and that is much harder to do if you are still responsible for your children after they've grown.

Oedipus, then, leaves on his own, and on the road encounters a stranger, who insists that Oedipus move out of his way. However, Oedipus has made his choice, so he doesn't budge. This stranger is, of course, Laius, Oedipus' real father, and you know what happens next. This means that Oedipus is no longer a servant of his nomos, and he makes his own choices. However, he is not yet fully aware of this, as shown by the fact that it will take him years to realize that he had killed his own father. He is also unaware that, though he may have killed his parent, his parent's influence made him who he was, they defined his carnal existence.

It is the father's role to instigate the expression of individuality in his children (as opposed to the mother's role of providing the child with the raw materials it needs to develop). This takes form in one of two ways: the father as protector, as representative of the family, who assures his son that he is free to make his choices because he can always come home if things take a wrong turn; and the father as critic, as taskmaster, pointing out the mistakes he makes and the duties he must fulfill.

Our hero then learns of the ravages plaguing the nearby city of Thebes, which is where he actually comes from. This is when Oedipus begins his real journey into his own soul. Because he has left his true desires, his heiros, to the side, he must now win it back. That he was raised in Corinth shows that he had been living a life that was not his - that is to say, it is the life he chose to accomplish some purpose, but he is not "at home", as it were. Of course there are many who want to be where they were born, but then this is not a story about a man who stayed in his home village.

The source of the misfortunes in Thebes is the Sphinx, a horrible monster (?) with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. She is, of course, but an aspect of his psyche, and you don't need a doctorate in psychoanalysis to see how monsters in our head represent repressed aspects of the psyche. The Sphinx seems to me a rather crucial element of the story - it is only after facing the Sphinx that Oedipus is ready to truly face his mother.

It's important to remember once more that this is a dream. All the characters are objects in his psyche, which represent not the actual people but facets of the dreamer's mind. Thus, Oedipus did not actually murder his own father (to the extent that Oedipus was a real person), but murdered the father-object that unconsciously restrained/castrated him. Likewise, he probably heard the story of the Sphinx in Egypt one day, and that particular object came to represent a shadow aspect of his soul. And this, then, is the rest that Oedipus, and thus the listener/reader by analogy, must face when confronted with the Sphinx.

Oedipus explains the riddle of the Sphinx, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

In what is probably too well-known to be a true puzzle anymore, the Sphinx asks Oedipus: what animal has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening? Oedipus, though, is ready, and he knows the answer: man himself. It doesn't seem like a particularly difficult puzzle, but it's not the puzzle per se which is the key but rather what the puzzle represents. In realizing that the riddle did not ask a literal question, he was able to see what was actually behind the riddle: an ability to think metaphorically.

And there's the rub. This whole story is a puzzle, nothing is literal here. In showing that he's ready to confront events not as things per se, but as representations of what's going in his mind, Oedipus demonstrates that he is ready to be accountable for his own choices. After he answers the puzzle correctly, the Sphinx throws herself from a cliff, back into the deep portions of the mind. Oedipus, meanwhile, is treated as a savior and made king, since the previous king, his father, had obviously gone missing.

The result is that Oedipus marries his own mother, Jocasta, and while at first he is not actually conscious of the fact that it's his mother, this is actually true for most men. Look at any man's wife, and from the right angle you can see how strikingly similar she is to his own mother, if not in appearance then in temperament. And there is nothing wrong with this! This is simply part of the natural development of a man's psyche, and the sooner he recognizes this the more able he is to be genuinely himself. He chose his mother, after all.

If we consider the cross of the psyche, we have the nomos/superego at the top and the heiros/id at the bottom. That the nomos is usually represented by the mother and the heiros the father in no way means that literally the mother played the mother's role and vice-versa, although this is often the case. The nomos is what we draw from the Outside, that which we consume and which was provided by our family and environment. Normally it is the mother who literally carries out this role, but many people do so throughout a person's life. The heiros, on the other hand, is that connection between our incarnate self and our discarnate self, or Higher Self, or soul.

So our mother feeds us, both materially and energically, and gives us the nourishment we need. Naturally, we realize that she is the provider of life, and we long to return to the Eden that was her womb, where everything around was one, and where we had everything we needed. Now, once born, we feel the material world castrating our desires, so we want to go back to mommy, and sometimes we do. This is why our desires are almost always associated with our mother, and why we end up marrying women like them. As long as we don't do it literally though, everything ends up OK. It's the father's job to show the boy that it's ok to be castrated sometimes, it doesn't stop you from achieving your desires.

Does that look like a man with mommy issues?

I am speaking here, of course, of the archetypical male's journey - surely women also have a superego and an id, but the polarities are different, so the story plays out differently. Further on I'll look at myths where women are the main characters, such as the stories of Elektra and Antigone (which are connected to Oedipus anyway).

Oedipus then finds himself king of Thebes and husband to his mother. Now, if you've been following, you'll understand that he is actually married to a woman who looks/behaves like his mother, you don't need to wonder about the age difference - has has children with this woman. Eventually the queen finds out she has been married to her son, and kills herself. Oedipus has accepted and integrated his mother-object to the point that it is a part of himself, of his subjectivity, and no longer needs to be projected onto a psychical object.

In the story, Oedipus finds his mother's corpse and discovers the truth (actually, he knew it all along). He takes a pin from her clothes and stabs both his eyes, becoming blind. And here the story comes full circle - remember that this all started with a blind seer. What does the blindness represent? The prophet does not need eyes to see. He understands that everything is a metaphor, and is thus able to interpret patterns and cycles. Oedipus has attained self-knowledge to the point where he no longer needs to rely on his mother-object, while at the same realizing that he is a product of his heritage.

If the king is the man who has taken charge of his life, the seer is the man who has accepted his life. Fire is the element associated with consciousness and vital energy, and its three zodiacal signs shows the three stages of the development of this consciousness: first is Aries, the warrior, who has a desire and therefore willpower, but whose desires are a product of his commander; second is Leo, the king, who has broken from the bonds of his past and is now fully responsible for his own life and his own choices; third is Sagittarius, the prophet, who has understood the mission he has carried out, and is able to see his patterns repeated before him.

So what does the Oedipus myth teach us? It teaches us that we need to accept paradoxes in life because it is in these very paradoxes that lies meaning. It teaches us that we are responsible for everything about us, not only our own bodies and lives but everything that happens around us. We have made choices, and the more we are aware of these choices, the better we can become at carrying them out. Oedipus teaches us that while it certainly is our parents' fault that we turned out screwed up the way we did, it was your choice to turn out this way in the first place - the trick is to understand why you made those choices, and accept them rather than avoid them. He teaches us that our first, primeval desire is indeed for our mothers, but that it's ok because that's the only way we can have a desire in the first place.

Now that you know where your desire comes from, it is time to refine it. Certainly there are aspects of your desire that you believe to be moral or ethical, and some that you believe to be just wrong. It is up to you, then, to give in to or to forgo those desires, and to accept responsibilities for those choices. Understand that while everything that happens to you is in some way about you, nothing that happens is exclusively about you either. So to what extent does your desire come into contradiction with others' desire? What lessons can you learn from all those interactions?

Are you ready to answer the riddle of your own Sphinx?

The Fourfold Youniverse, pt. 2: the Elemental Man

In the first part of the series, I discussed the division of reality into the four elements. The four elements, together with the three essential qualities, give us the twelve signs of the zodiac. This provides us with another reason to refute astrology as the heavens somehow causally affecting events on Earth - the zodiac is about the intrinsic qualities of life on the planet (perhaps of all reality, but I doubt that - either way, who's to say what astrology is elsewhere?).

This is where the value of Fire reveals itself: most are busy making a microscopic analysis of the facts, and only a few care to take a bird's-eye view of the matter. When you look at an ant, it's hard to understand its purpose, why it does what it does, but look at the colony as a whole and you'll start to get the picture. Likewise, while there certainly is some worth to a dividing, detail-oriented approach, the truth can only be seen if the results of that approach are compared with the results of a macro approach.

At ground level, it's just a weird neighborhood

I've always had a soft spot for movies when it comes to art, which is easy to tell. The reason is very simple: insofar as art is an expression of the collective unconscious, movies are the way it can be done with the element of time (it is possible via other art forms, such as photography, putting pictures in a chronological order, but if you do that, it starts to become less photography and more cinema anyway). Movies, then, tell the stories that we as a whole dream about - stories that always express the archetypes of Earth, just as your dreams express your own archetypes.

Coming back to psychology first, though, let's take another look at the four functions of the psyche. I have always felt that the standard psychoanalytic dynamic of ego/superego/id was somehow lacking (not to mention that the id is critically misunderstood - but don't take my word for it), just as the traditional Father/Son/Holy Spirit division also lacked its fourth element. Well, until the assumption of Mary in 1950, that is.

Thus, in order for my own concepts of the psychoanalytic dynamic not to be confused with the classic, I'll be giving them different names - which of course carry their own load, but I'm not going to invent gobbledygook either. So the superego and the id, as a whole, are more or less clearly defined, which led me to see the ego as actually being a conflation of two opposing factors. We have then:

Nomos then corresponds to the superego, and heiros (meaning 'sacred') to the id. It should be clear that, where Freud saw a depository of repressed memories and desires, I see rather a connection to that part of us which lies outside of space and time - our soul, as it were, but not that ghosty thing inside your body that a lot of people will imagine. The function of the element of water in our psyche is to act as a connection to our higher self, as it were, which includes, of course, our memories. It's easy to see that memory retrieval is hardly logical, or even coherent. The heiros is your guardian angel, that voice inside your head - which is a part of you, not someone else, remember - that tells you to do something crazy that turns out to actually work. Yes, the devil is part of the sacred too.

That leaves us with eros and logos. Eros, the element of fire, represents our desire, our will, our consciousness, not to mention our ability to make choices. Without the eros, the individual will be nothing more than a slave to the outer rules, the nomos - he won't even move, really. However, it's certainly not easy to make choices, especially when the inner feeling conflicts with the outer norm. This is where the logos comes in: it is the mediator between the nomos and the the heiros, the helper, the logical thinker.

The eros is also what we would consider to be our identity. An identity, something that differenciates you, is what allows you to separate from the nomos. However, all the archetypes are within us, even the ones we consider diametrically opposed to our identity. We thus need to project those conflicting archetypes, to use others as a way of expressing that archetype without feeling like you lost yourself. That's where the logos comes in - it acts as a mediator between yourself and that part of yourself which are most distant from. This is why the logos will usually appear in one's dreams as a person of the opposite sex - as Jung would call it, the anima or animus of the individual.

Cupid and Psyche, by William Etty

So if all the characters in your dream are just the different aspects of yourself, it would seem to make sense to take the characters in a movie as the different aspects of a single individual - usually the main character, but it doesn't really matter who the dreamer is, since movies are telling collective stories, to which each of us can relate in varying degrees. This explains why there is romance in just about every film - we are unconsciously attempting to get in touch with our other selves.

Take the classic romance story. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, but some form of authority (parents, customs, governments, etc) comes in the way, and they can't be together, until boy receives help from an unlikely source and they are able to defeat the authority and finally get together. In order to become individuals, we must separate ourselves from the collective, the outer rules, and choose our own paths, and that is why movies are the predominant art form of the post-modern age. We all want to be individuals, desperately, to have our own story.

It's the same for everyone: in order to grow and to protect ourselves from the chaos of earthly life, we need to have a sense of structure and order, which we get from our parents, teachers, governors, etc. As we continue on the journey, the world itself changes, and sometimes the old rules don't work out anymore. It's not easy, though, to change the structure, because it makes us feel helpless, powerless. The help we need is also within us, however. This is where the heiros comes in - it's that part of yourself which allows you to reform the nomos, as it were, a process that will always involve pain and loss. Very often, we are depressed because we recognize intuitively that something is not right, but we cannot seem to know what. It's hard to tell which rule is wrong.

However, we usually don't realize that the losses and pain we go through serve a purpose, and are there ultimately for our own benefit (which can, admittedly, be hard to see). Most believe that the ultimate purpose of life on Earth is happiness, but if you look at the system objectively, you'll be hard-pressed to find indications that this is actually the case - in fact, it would be much easier to argue that the very purpose of life of Earth is suffering and difficulty. But then, if it were easy, it would be no fun.

The four functions of the psyche correspond to the four quadrants in an astrological birth chart. Thus, a person who has many planets in the 1st quadrant (1st to 3rd houses) will generally be rather eros-driven, and will be particularly prone to the qualities and defects of eros, that is, particularly concerned with their own identity and their own will. There is a particular paradox that occurs, then, when the 1st quadrant is filled with planets in the signs of the 3rd zodiacal quadrant, for example the person with a Sun in Libra in the first house. However, these opposing qualities allow the person to reduce the paradox, the complexio oppositorium, to its core. So, to spin the circle back to movies one more time (I include TV series in the category, of course there are distinctions but the medium is essentially the same), let us concretize, and see an example:

Elementary. Look at that word again, and remember that it means 'simple'. Archetypes are elementary. Well, well. So if we psychoanalyze the series, so to speak, we should be able to see the dynamics quite easily - and indeed, they are in your face. The Sherlock Holmes character was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. Poe was the grandfather of the modern mystery story, and in one of the stories, "The Purloined Letter", the eponymous letter, desperately sought by the police but never found, was in fact hidden in plain sight. Likewise, the mysteries of the universe aren't locked away in some secret alcove, rather, they're right there on TV, looking at us.

Here is the IMDB synopsis, if you haven't seen the show:

Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is a recovering addict who meets Joan Watson (Lucy Lui) as his 'sober companion'. Initially their relationship is strictly professional, and somewhat frosty, but they grow to understand and work with one another, eventually forming a friendship and partnership. Together they assist Captain Gregson and Detective Bell of the NYPD, where Holmes' observational abilities and deductive talent unravel a series of complicated cases.

Alongside his police work, Sherlock struggles with a past he left behind in London involving an ex-girlfriend Irene Adler, a 'nemesis' in Moriarty, and an absent father.

Let us imagine then, that all four main characters (for dream-interpretation purposes, two people can represent the same character) represent the four elements. Watson is the main character, the series is about her, not Holmes. She was originally a surgeon, but became a sober companion, and then a detective after meeting Holmes. All of those are about helping other people. Additionally, she possesses many characteristics associated with Libra: she is generally cheerful and pleasant, she has a good sense of fashion and tends to be indecisive at times, and she's quite sympathetic.

Holmes, on the other hand, is impulsive, prone to temper tantrums, aggressive and selfish, characteristics of Aries. Since the main character here is a woman, it stands to reason that the logos would be of the opposite sex. Furthermore, he's British, that is, a foreigner, and foreigners in dreams represent aspects of ourselves that are very strange or distant to us. Watson, representing the Libra archetype, has a natural tendency to reject Aries characteristics, but there comes a time in everyone's life when they must confront their logos, the aspect of ourselves we project on others. This becomes particularly poignant during our 40s, and is what most people mean when they talk about midlife crises. Yes, Watson is middle-aged (Lucy Liu is 45).

Captain Gregson and Detective Bell, the police generally, represent the heiros of the dreamer. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, because usually the police are the agents of the nomos, of the repressive authority, but if we have an inverse chart then that's what fits. Either way, you'll notice they're not the prototypical cops: they're helpful and protective at times, and challenge and confront at other times. The role of the heiros is double, at once defending and criticizing, but the objective is the same: to get the dreamer on the right path, whichever that might be. I'll leave you to figure out how Moriarty is Cancer - to do so myself would be to spoil the first season.

Remember that clothes broadcast our identities

So, if the nomos is the bad guy, what's it doing there? Well, we all have our shadow side. It might seem right to suggest that Moriarty is amoral, but I would argue otherwise: Moriarty is unethical, not amoral. He doesn't play by anyone's rules but his own, but he has his own rules. The nomos exists because it is our structure, it is the stuff that we are made of. Without an internal structure, we are at the mercy of the elements (har, har). This is why Capricorn, the sign of the nomos, is represented by a mammal, which has a bone structure, and Cancer, the sign of the heiros, is represented by a crab, which has an exoskeleton instead (that is, a soft interior). It is only with an inner structure that we survive the outer conflicts, and with an outer structure that we survive our inner conflicts.

The nomos has the resources that we need at our disposal. In the case of the show, Moriarty has all the deductive resources, let's say, that are necessary, as evidenced by the fact that he is constantly outsmarting Holmes. Holmes himself is the epitome of rationality, and thus accurately represents the logos: our critical faculty, our ability to judge facts objectively, to get outside our own skin, as it were. The thing about the logos, though, is that it is completely amoral, in the sense that any choice can be rationalized - it's a cliché example, but the nazis justified their actions with science too. Thus, just as Watson needs to Holmes to be an objective analyst, Holmes needs Watson (and the cops) to be his moral compass.

It's fitting that the show is about assassinations, too. When someone is nomos-possessed (and note how Watson is extremely subservient to her parents), that is, when the superego is running the show, he or she will not hesitate to "kill" any aspects of self that are a threat to the status quo. However, a human being, just like the Earth itself, is a self-regulating system, and that's where the logos comes in. Its function, as I mentioned earlier, is to act as a balancer between the nomos and the heiros. When it detects that the nomos is unfairly powerful, it comes to the rescue - in this case, in the form of an Aries investigative detective. It's interesting to note that Scorpio (Mars rules both Aries and Scorpio, fyi) is the sign of criminal investigations and death, but also of psychology itself. It is also the sign of sex, which is a literal representation of the reduction of the complexio oppositorum.

Before teaming up with Watson, Holmes had been in rehab after excessive use of heroin (there's that Scorpio again). Frequently, people who overdose on drugs, or attempt suicide in general, are doing so as a call for attention. The logos needed to get the eros's attention, and indeed it did. Previously, Holmes had lived in London - far away from Watson's conscience. Interestingly, Watson was hired by Holmes's father; interesting because the heiros and the logos compose the patriarchal, right-hand side of the wheel. After all, father is absent - there had, until now, been an excess of nomos and a lack of heiros.

If the role of the superego is to consolidate the individual, to establish the rules, it is the id's job to question those rules, in short, to reform the superego. To sum up the first season of Elementary, Holmes and Watson become gradually aware of the existence of Moriarty, who always seems to be two (or ten) steps ahead. In the final episode, and it's no spoiler to say this, they finally manage to outsmart and thwart Moriarty. Watson is finally able to begin reintegrating her broken self, and rid herself of the excess weight dropped on her by her parents. She has become the Elemental Woman.

Who's your daddy? No, really

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my work, ye mighty, and despair!"

There's a popular idea amongst the conspiracy crowd that one of the characteristics of the Illuminati (or other villain-du-jour) is that they "never let a crisis go to waste." It doesn't take very long, though, to find good ole projection acting out again - the debate is never more intense than after a terrible tragedy, such as the recent shooting in Sandy Hook. The victims' bodies were still warm when the extremists (many in the mainstream media, even) took the opportunity to spout the usual nonsense, usually revolving around gun control.

It doesn't need to be said that there is a complete lack of respect for the victims and their families (the worst are those who say "well, I don't want to politicize the issue, but..."), but they don't even use these unfortunate events to talk about the real issues. Of course, gun control isn't a real issue - morality is. There is an underlying celebration of these events, almost, because it helps to steer everyone away from self-reflection. Perhaps, then, once again, we should dampen the white noise of the media and see where the semiotic crumbs lead us...

While a look at the meaning behind the name Alexander (Sandy <- Sandra <- Alexandra) is not uninteresting, the story of a certain conqueror is probably more worth taking a look at, so that we can widen the scope a little bit. The story of Alexander the Great is a great reminder of the narcissism that is all too frequent in our brief history. But first, a bit of background.

"How do I look, dad?"

It's pretty clear that, although we do live in an excessively authoritative society, it's wrong to call it patriarchal. That is to say, it is patriarchal in the sense that the biological father rules, but not in the sense that the archetypal father rules (i.e. pseudopatriarchal). In order to understand this, we need to take a look at what motherhood and fatherhood are really about.

The matriarchate/patriarchate dichotomy can be seen in the Zodiac (as anything else, really), in this case as the left side of the wheel for the former and the right side for the latter. I will go into more detail on this later on, for now suffice it to consider that the Capricorn-to-Gemini sweep is about the archetypal mother (hence the 10th House representing the mother figure) and the Cancer-to-Sagittarius sweep about the father*.

The point is: 85-95% of Westerners gets stuck at the Cancer level; that is to say, there is an absence of a father figure for most of us. Rather than progress through that stage of development, most will regress back to one of the stages of the matriarchal sweep (i.e. rationalization, greed/gluttony, violence, drugs, ideologies, authorities). The (not necessarily biological) mother's role is to feed the baby, nurture it, make it feel loved and cared for. This is necessary because it's how the baby will gain self-confidence and become assertive. However, there comes a point when the umbilical cord (literal or otherwise) needs to be cut, and this is where the father comes in.

If no one is there to separate the child from the mother, s/he begins to feel entitled to warmth, food and protection. Soon, s/he starts believing s/he 'more' special (or equal) than the others, and then naturally becomes more and more fearful, because it cannot conceive of being separated from all it 'deserves.' The father's 'job' is not only to show the child that the world is not going to bend to his/her whims, but also to assure him/her that everything is going to be alright in the end. After all, daddy still gets mommy's love after spending most of the day away, and without crying or making a fuss.

So back to Alexander. It's not news that the nobility tends to be exceptionally spoiled, but Alexander's case is borderline stereotypical. Here are a few short passages from the Wiki entry:

• "Philip [Alexander's father], overjoyed at this display of courage and ambition, kissed his son tearfully, declaring: 'My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedon is too small for you.'" This is a reference to the famous episode of the taming of Bucephalas.
• "Some of Alexander's strongest personality traits formed in response to his parents. His mother had huge ambitions, and encouraged him to believe it was his destiny to conquer the Persian Empire."
• "According to Plutarch, among Alexander's traits were a violent temper and rash, impulsive nature, which undoubtedly contributed to some of his decisions."
• "During his final years, and especially after the death of Hephaestion, Alexander began to exhibit signs of megalomania and paranoia."
• "He appears to have believed himself a deity, or at least sought to deify himself. Olympias [his mother] always insisted to him that he was the son of Zeus."

What's clear here is that the matriarchal side of Alexander's development was taken too far, given that his father, who clearly felt entitled himself**, was simply yet another mother to him. Alexander's self-confidence was taken to very high levels, but the difference with him is that he happened to be a military genius, allowing his narcissism to reach epic proportions. The fear that he would not get, well, everything, certainly made him aggressive, and no doubt had its effects on his sexuality as well, though the specifics are up to speculation.

Needless to say, conquering the whole planet wouldn't have made Alexander into Zeus. As a matter of fact, Zeus himself was very aware of the father's role: whenever humans committed hubris, he was quick to act. He may have been a bit excessive at times, but he had the right idea.

Jeff immediately regretted giving Zeus the finger

However, egomaniacal despots are far from the only way the father's absence can manifest, and this brings us back to Newtown. I suggest you take a look at this post over at the Secret Sun to get the details, but it seems that Adam Lanza's father's absence was more than just physical. This absence left the mother to fill the hole, and boy was she the wrong stuff for that. By all appearances, the massacre was a result of Lanza's belief in the Maya apocalypse, a belief fed to him via his paranoid mother.

After all, contemporary Connecticut isn't exactly Prohibition-era Chicago. The Lanzas lived in a very peaceful neighborhood, so it's clear their paranoia was completely out of proportion - which suggests the issues were more in their heads than in the real world. The same is true, of course, for most gun-rights activists and doom-sayers, but the consequences in this case were particularly tragic.

Another manifestation is the entitlement culture that has been booming lately, and not just in the US (here in Brazil we have our own such programs, such as the "Bolsa Família"). Unfortunately, the debate is always quickly hijacked by extremists, and it always comes down to "those bums are feeding off my taxes" versus "they can't do anything about it" - which means that if you favor cuts to 'entitlement programs' while at the same time wanting to help the unfortunate...well, there's not much room for you.

In the end, then, all everyone ends up talking about is what others are doing wrong. Never mind that what is right or wrong has more to do with the culture and historical period than with absolute laws, i.e., ethics is not the same as morality. This is where the lack of father figure comes in: the father forces you to figure out what's right or wrong based on experience, both your own and others', rather than on some abstract ideology or on an "authority."

What nobody talks about regarding gun control is that 'banning all the guns' or 'semi-automatics for everyone' are attempts at change from the outside, that is to say, not the responsibility of an actual person. Banning guns frees you from the responsibility of considering the ethics of gun ownership, doesn't require you to think about how the issue is reflected in your own life. Likewise, in clinging tightly to your rifle and defending yourself from the control of the government, you don't take time to consider whether it's reasonable for you to own that rifle in the first place.

What can you do to prevent another such massacre? Frankly, nothing. All the extreme, reactionary measures are simply putting a band-aid on a cancer, because they're just another case of attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. What you CAN do, however, is to raise your children properly (i.e. making sure there are both mother and father figures, regardless of the actual people involved), work on improving yourself, think about what it means to be a moral person, help out your community without the expectation of something in return. You may not be able to stop another Adam Lanza from shooting up a school, but it certainly is within your power not to raise an Adam Lanza yourself.


UPDATE: next on the blame list, DNA





* Cancer is a sign that is usually associated with the mother, and this is not wrong per se. However, there's more to motherhood than breastfeeding...

** In fact, Philip probably began to live through his son after a certain age; realizing that he had not conquered the world, he would make sure that his son (i.e. "it was thanks to me he became so smart") did such a thing, living it by proxy

Rover's in a Farm Upstate, Timmy

It seems that lately death has been in the air, and then some. Of course, as usual, nothing is ever good or bad per se. That death is, in some intangible way, closer to us, is just the beginning of Saturn's transit through Scorpio (not to mention Saturn transiting the natal Pluto of those of my generation). This feeling has been alleviated recently due to entry of the Moon and Mercury into Sagittarius, but be sure that there will be an undertow of death in the next couple of years. Now, I've discussed death before, but given the circumstances, it might do well to revisit the subject once more.

It's a given that Western culture does not have a very healthy attitude towards death (which was exacerbated by the idea behind most monotheistic religions that this life is your "one shot to make it"), but it seems to be particularly true in 21st-century America. This is mostly manifest in one of two ways: either one believes that "I'm screwed anyway" and takes an all too casual attitude towards death, or one believes that everything that will not lead to salvation (in their narrow-minded view) is not worth dealing with. It needn't be said, however, that the truth is usually somewhere in between.

Things are becoming more and more extreme, of course. The most salient manifestation is the Maya doomsday prophecy. There is a clear misunderstanding of the cyclical nature of time - the end of a cycle is never the end, period. There is no "end, period." Unfortunately, any potential end of a cycle is quickly co-opted by fearmongers, because a good sheep is a frightened sheep. But...take a look at the endless proclamations of apocalypse - especially those discussed in the media - and you'll be hard-pressed to find a prediction that came true.

"I'm sure THIS time the Space Brothers will come!"

It wasn't until recently, however, that things took a turn towards nihilism, and that's where the real danger lies. At least the "one-shotter" who is trying to get his ticket to Heaven is trying to live out some idea of morality. The apocalypse cults were usually restricted to the fringe, but it doesn't take long to see impending doom in some way or other nowadays, and this takes many more forms than your run-of-the-mill ancient prophecy.

One of the more subtle ways the surrender to death appears is in popular culture (which is rarely taken seriously). An early example is the success of doomsday-asteroid flicks Armageddon and Deep Impact, and another the boom in War of the Worlds scenarios (Independence Day and so on). You don't have to be Jung to realise that popular culture is merely a reflection of what's going on in the minds of people, and hopelessness is the law of the day. Even in Armageddon, where the world is saved, I would venture that most people don't think salvation is a realistic scenario. Looking for Bruce Willis means we're not thinking about what we can do to save the world.

But what are YOU doing?

The thing is, the more you fear death, the more power you attribute to it, and the more you allow to shape your life. It's no wonder, then, that one of the memes getting the most plays out there is zombies*. I'm not going to bother listing the many instances out there, just look at how zombies have been faring better than vampires (though of course a certain tween franchise may have had something to do with that) - and even then, vampires are all about death too.

The biggest hit nowadays is The Walking Dead. It's telling that most people don't realise that the title refers not only to the zombies, but to the survivors as well (i.e.: death is always just around the corner). It's no coincidence that zombies popularly eat brains, because that's exactly what they do. Since the alphas of the world have been so successful in instilling fear of death in the populace, it makes sense that we need zombie flicks to project this fear in order to feel slightly better our predicament.

Is "Fear the living" what you want to hear?

The problem with zombie scenarios (aside from the fact that they are arguably the most unrealistic doomsday scenario, as any study of epidemiology will show - we are VERY good at adapting) is that they are, most of the time, completely hopeless. To live in a zombie world is to completely surrender all hope that there are better things out there. It allows us to abdicate from our responsibilities towards helping to make the world a better place: "The whole world's gone to the shitter, so I might as well drink my way out."

I urge the reader, then, to consider why they are watching zombie movies. This is in no way an indictment of, for instance, The Walking Dead. I haven't seen it myself, but from all I hear it's excellently produced, has very good characters, and so on. The important thing is to be aware of the psychosocial dynamics at play. That is to say: don't get too invested in it.

However, the fear of death rears its ugly head in many places. Geekdom and science are some of the latest victims. If you remember the science fiction of the 70s, hope and optimism abounded. In spite of their sci-fi guise, Star Wars and Star Trek clearly conveyed the idea that life was more than the sum of its parts. There was a deep fascination with the endless possibilities of the universe, and the character dynamics involved hope, sacrifice, and courage. Now what do we get? Humans caught in an ages-old machine war.

Star Trek had the balls to talk about God

It's more than just sci-fi, however. It's also sci. The mindset du jour in the scientific academia (though this has been playing out for long - Carl Sagan is certainly not recent - it's only recently that they've achieved mainstream glorification) is the view that life is simply a accident, and that after death there is nothing**. Basically, what Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are selling you is that "life's a bitch, and then you die."

Is it any wonder, then, that millions upon millions flock to evangelical churches? Say you were born in the slums, and saw violence and destruction around you on a daily basis. Then two characters come to you trying to convince you to join their side. One of them says: "You were simply unlucky in the lottery of life. There's nothing after all this violence, so you're pretty much screwed. Also, you're just like any schmuck out there." The other says: "You are special and there's something special waiting for you after death. Just hang tough, endure the bad stuff, and soon enough your suffering will go away." Who would most people follow?

Attendance levels "skeptics" can only dream of

One of the most disturbing aspects of the materialistic view is the singularity theory. Ray Kurzweil and co. suggest, essentially, that one day machines will take over (though usually this is along the lines that we'll evolve into machines or insert our consciousness into machines) and that we will live forever after this point. Here is where our sick relationship with death is most clearly manifest: the idea that we deserve to live forever.

The assumption, of course, is that death is a bad thing. Death is, however, acausally related to Birth. Where there is a birth, there will necessarily be a death. Conversely, though, wherever there is death, there is also birth. Remember Newton (one of history's most famous astrologers/alchemists)? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is not limited to material physics. Why then attribute an arbitrary value to death?

There is also the assumption that there can be a ghost in the machine. As far as evolution into robots goes, there is absolutely no confirmation that consciousness can ever be physically moved around - the translation of consciousness is a particularly nonsensical idea when you realise that the 'organ' of consciousness is the electrical field around us. As for robots taking over, it's quite simple: a character can never be more than a fragment of its creator (in all levels). You can teach a robot to do any rational calculation, but you can never teach a robot to do art, can you? All it will be able to do is imitate what has already been done. Why anyone would aspire to that is baffling.

The electrical field of the heart is 60 times greater than that of the brain

Undoubtedly, many science types will argue that the fact that we have never transferred consciousness is not proof that it cannot be done. Indeed, it's not. Consciousness, however, is not for the realm of science to deal with. It is not something that can be objectively experimented with, tested, and so on - it's necessarily subjective.

There is almost an undercurrent of panic when it comes to death in the 21st century, which makes it clear that this morbid fascination with hopeless scenarios is simply the death knell of the old Western culture. It doesn't take an economist to make a grim assessment of the situation in Europe and the US, and the cultural decline is but a reflection of this overall decay. Since we haven't been properly taught to deal with death, the only reaction left is panic (even if it is a very covert panic).

In the twilight of their empire, the British had the common sense to realise that their dominance was unsustainable. This allowed them to come out relatively unscathed from the decline of their hegemony. The same is not true in the US or the EU, though. There is a desperate clinging to the old energies - old energies that make less and less sense as each day goes by.

This is all well, though. If you've been paying attention, you'll see that this is also the birth of something new. While Western culture begins to eat itself, a new culture will rise. For every materialist turning to zombie entertainment there is a seeker who is tired of hopelessness. Think, then, on which side of history you want to find yourself in. Do you want to live within an idea of survivalism and fear, or do you want to live Love? Either way, the tide will wash away the cynics. A new dawn always puts a damper of the fear of darkness.

* Please check out this post for a more eloquent discussion of zombie-mania.

** I can't help but remember a quotation by Mark Twain: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

The Fourfold Youniverse, pt. 1

"1 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

So begins the most well-known version of the Bible in English, the King James Bible. We see here an example of how we often take the elders' wisdom for granted: the same idea that we see in Genesis can be found in countless sources, Aristotle being one of the more prominent. Namely, that all things are made up of the four elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

Now, the concretistic (i.e. 'earthy') reader will no doubt point out that things are a lot more complicated than the number 4 allows for. The instinctive ('fiery') reader, however, will see that sometimes simplifying can be a source of understanding as well.

Let's back up then. The most underlying (that is, non-reducible) distinction occurs between the positive and negative polarities. To reduce that polarity would be to return to the state of Oneness from which we began. We can assume, however, that things began in Unity, and this is where the common 'believer' will begin to get lost, because they still see this Unity as something separate from themselves, oblivious to the paradox that is the separation of Man and God. This is why I will generally abstain from using the term 'God', though I have no problem with it whatsoever.

So if the beginning came with the first division into polarities, these polarities must have come from an irreducible Unity (i.e. positive and negative, rather than 'or'). This Unity was all that there was. There was only one thing which it was not, which was exactly not being a Unity. This Unity then began to divide so that it could experience what it would be like not to be All, for there to be separation. So the Unity sacrificed itself to become all that is not One - and this is where we conscious beings come in. But that comes about later.

The first division, then, is between + and -. The former implies movement while the latter implies stability. Indeed, in the poles of a magnet, the electromagnetic field flows from the positive to the negative. However, something cannot be both mobile and stable at the same time. This can be found in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, where you can measure either the position (-) or the speed (+) of a given particle, but not both at the same time. Likewise, an electron, for instance, can only be taken as either a particle (-) or a wave (+), never both at the same time. Back to Genesis: "3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

The paradox here is that this dynamic leads to a kind of stability in and of itself. This would require then a division of these two basic elements into four, and it is here that we leave positive and negative and head towards the four elements. In order for Unity to become non-Unity, there must be separation. This separation is then realised through the positive polarity (movement) and the negative (stability). In many creation myths, the first elements to be introduced are Air and Earth (Heaven and Earth, Gaia and Ouranos*, etc...). They are the elements that imply a separation, so this works out.

We have then Air (+) and Earth (-). For there to exist separation, then, these two elements are required: this original essence becomes matter (Earth); however, this is not enough, as all is still connected, which leads us to the appearance of space (Air). Back at the ranch of the Bible, we have in Genesis: "6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [...]8 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so." [replace 'waters' with 'unity' here to get the picture]. But if all we have are space and matter, we come back to a natural stability. This requires the injection of two more factors.

It's not hard to imagine, then, Fire bringing a little energy to this system. The introduction of a chaotic element will certainly bring dynamism into the equation - chao ex ordo (the chaos out of the order). Fire itself, though, is clearly not enough - while most people see the value of a little chaos, no one wants to live in eternal chaos. We have to add the dichotomic element then, representing ordo ex chao (or chao ad ordo): Water.

Since we started out with space and matter, we will end up with the elements that bring some objective dynamism to the whole picture: energy and time. When Aristotle, then, said that everything is made up of the four elements, he was right: is there anything other than space, time, matter and energy? (The priest or psychologist will be quick to point out the anima - the soul, or consciousness - but we will see that this Fifth Element is simply another octave of Fire.)

If time is the fourth dimension of space, then it probably makes sense to consider energy as being simply the fourth dimension of matter. However, going down that direction seems like a bit too much navel-gazing. Let us come back to the beginning once more then. First, we have Earth and Air. It makes no sense, though, to be eternally separate, as it would defeat the entire purpose of separation in the first place. So there comes an element that will try to bring this separation back into Unity: Fire. The second law of thermodynamics makes this pretty clear: all matter will be reduced, eventually, back to pure energy. This leads to the introduction of the last element, which comes to balance Fire: Water, that is, time. Time is what allows all experiences to be actually experienced, rather than be immediately brought down to Unity. It is quite necessary, actually: we need to be able to see the order that lies in the fiery chaos to be able to truly become One again.

"Okay, that's all well and good, but if all the stuff that exists comes from Unity, it is still, after all, Unity, no?" Indeed, and that's where the Wild Card comes in: consciousness/Love. For Unity to become non-Unity, it must sacrifice its will. The will of the Unity can only be found in that initial moment, shaping everything that comes after, but what is done with this is not up to it anymore. And here come the point where the theologian will switch off: the Unity - God - does not, in fact, have free will in this manifest world. It was sacrificed for multiple free wills. That does not mean to say that the Unity knows not all - it knows all the potentials, for it created those potentials, but it does not know exactly how it will play out.

This is why the concept of prayer is so misunderstood. Many people, when praying, expect God to intercede on their behalf - but how can something with no will make a decision? They fail to realise that they themselves are the manifestation of free will! And this is where the idea of God being within us begins to make sense: God is not an old man in the sky (nor a devil under the earth, I might add) - you are simply a fractal of the Unity. Have you ever thought about why it's called the YOUniverse?

The famous comparison between a neural network and a model of the universe...hint, hint

Let's go back to physics a little bit. Heisenberg's principle states that something can be either a particle or a wave. A wave is a series of potentials within a certain fixed parameter. A particle is simply a given position in this wave of potentials. But what, then, determines whether it will be a wave or a particle? If we recall the idea of wavefunction collapse, the answer is easy: observation, that is, consciousness. The Universe without consciousness would simply be an infinite series of potentials - which is Unity.

Consciousness itself, though, is a unity (lower-case 'u'), which gives it a flavour of Fire. After all, although all the atoms in your body are different after 7 years, you still remain quintessentially 'you'. We see here the importance of the pyramid structure: the base gives us the four elements, while the capstone gives us an objective viewpoint from which to navigate those four elements. The pyramids in Egypt, for one, used to have a golden capstone, and it doesn't take much research to find the connection between gold and consciousness** (i.e. the sign of Leo).

A digital rendering of the Giza pyramid in ancient times

The four elements can also be found (well, everywhere, but...) in the four functions of the mind as exposed by Jung:

- intuition (fire): the desire to bring things back to Oneness, innate knowledge, desire, energy, chaos (absolute chaos can be seen as a unity), consciousness;

- sensation (earth): the material world, physical limitations, registering phenomena;

- thinking (air): rationality, putting things apart (i.e.: putting 'space' between things), abstract processes;

- feeling (water): seeing unity in the chaos, connecting the different times, value, unconsciousness;

Fire and Earth are the irrational, extraverted functions of the mind: fire wants to go back to Unity (a Unity which cannot be rationalised), while Earth depends on input from outside. That leaves Air and Water as the rational, intraverted functions: after all, thinking and feeling exist inside ourselves. A good example to make this more clear is the difference between Freud and Jung: while both were psychologists (that is, both started from Water, seeking to find coherence in the chaos of the psyche), Freud favoured his earthy aspect (seeking to establish a 'psychological science') while Jung favoured his fiery aspect (while not seeking to establish a 'psychological religion', it can be argued that he did just that). This bridges us from the inside world of the mind to the outside world of human thought.

The most telling dichotomy in this world is probably that between 'science' and 'religion'. One can see no shortage of disputes between both, which is actually quite funny, given that they are the irrational functions (i.e. they depend on 'outside' sources, as it were) of the mind - it is quite easy to see how scientists' attitude can be 'religious', and how theologians' attitudes can be a bit too 'scientific'. This problem is easily enough solved with the auxiliary functions of philosophy (which will give a sense of ethics to either) and psychology (which will allow them to distinguish between 'good' and 'evil', two terms that are quite problematic, but a bit unavoidable). We have the schema then:

Now, I understand that this can be highly confusing, and that there is a number of potential objections to my line of thinking. However, the idea here is not to convince the reader with mathematical proof, but simply to leave some bread crumbs that lead down to the rabbit hole. In the next installment of the series, we'll take a look at how this dynamic affects the planets and signs in astrology, and further on I will propose a new system of exaltation that fits this new perspective.

Meanwhile, I certainly do not claim to have final knowledge of anything (there is no such thing in the human world), and I invite any physicists, theologians, philosophers and psychologists to let me know if I have made any egregious mistakes (especially the physicists - though it will be hard to convince them to discuss the immaterial), and all others to tip in with their thoughts. Hopefully, this dissertation will light a fire (or plant a seed, if you prefer) in the reader's mind, and lead all of this back to Oneness. In the meantime, be sure to check out my discussion on the three qualities, which will allow us to break down each of elements into three, giving us the twelve signs of the zodiac.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without the contributions of Freud Astrology - I am eternally in debt. Be sure to check it out if any of this arouses your interest!

* It is interesting to note that Gaia and Ouranos had twelve children (six male, six female) - bringing us easily towards the zodiac.

** This is why the 'invaders' of Ancient Astronaut mythology are said to come here after gold: they are not looking to take our physical gold (which is plentiful in the Universe), but our consciousnesses and our ability to make choices - this will be explored in further detail in my analysis of Cowboys vs. Aliens.