archetype Tag

March 9, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Beds are Burning

The Fallen Hero is a tragic motif that reappears in myth and fairy tale. It’s a tale as old as time. Yet, for me, what is unfolding as the trial of Oscar Pistorius painfully progresses amidst a cacophony of speculation and the dull drone of gossip is an ancient pattern that has existed for eons in human consciousness. It is the story of the Scape Goat.

Leviticus 16.22 says “ The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness…”

Historically, it was the reviled and exiled goat that was the sin bearer. The goat that carried away the matted filth of the tribe. The goat that either was cast out into the wilderness, or ritually slaughtered. Its blood cleansed our sins. Its unclean remains were burnt outside the boundaries of the community. In other tribal traditions it was a human being who performed this sacred ritual of sacrifice and collective atonement.

The Hebrew term for scapegoat is translated into English as meaning roughly “for absolute removal.”

Jews, blacks, Aborigines, women, homosexuals have been scapegoated for centuries. Those who appear to be weaker, different or who threaten the status of the community, set apart from the tribe. Sporting heroes, politicians or celebrities who fly too high and singe their wings are scapegoated in modern times. Scapegoats are tormented in our neighbourhoods, schools, universities, and in offices where people are singled out for bullying and harassment.

In the old eye for an eye paradigm, where power is externalised, “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” to quote Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight. Often the scapegoat begins to scapegoat others to purge the pain and rage of powerlessness.

There is something paradoxical about this once shining beautiful youth who carried the hopes of his countrymen so high on his young shoulders. Oscar Pistorius to me is the “maimed” scapegoat, like Oedipus with his deformed feet, or Hephaistos who was born deformed, he is living in a society where there has been history of scapegoating. Where there is a scapegoat there is often a feeling of collective powerlessness and great will to power or great rage perhaps deeply buried.

According to a bbc report, a neighbour of Oscar Pistorius found the South African Paralympic star praying over the body of Reeva Steenkamp as she lay dying. Recalling the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, Dr Stipp said he had heard gunshots and after making sure it was safe, went to help. When he got to Mr Pistorius house, he found the athlete kneeling by Ms Steenkamp, with “his left hand on her right groin, and his right hand – the second and third fingers – in her mouth”. There is something symbolic in this ritualistic rite perceived through mythic eyes. Self-loathing, victimisation, a compensation for the pain of being the impotent humiliated victim? Often the scapegoat begins to scapegoat others to purge the pain and rage of powerlessness. Sometimes the scapegoat is the healer-redeemer who believes that if they can save others, they will redeem, rescue the scapegoated part of themselves.

Victim and persecutor live in the same magnetic field and like metal filings attach themselves into the shape of an archetypal pattern. Our own feelings of being scapegoated are projected out onto others. We notice the outer “reality” though the magnet is hidden.

In this haunting hall of mirrors, we all must confront something dark and hidden and ominously destructive that is externalised as “the enemy out there” and carry the shadow of the collective.

The trial presents an archetypal tableau with all the elements of a Greek Tragedy. The Cast of Characters themselves carry the pattern of Scapegoat. And perhaps we need to ask ourselves who is the Scapegoat in this courtroom ritual which will indelibly affect the lives of so many: the young blonde victim, the black woman judge, the Afrikaans male athlete. If we look more deeply we may see the magnet. Perhaps by our own vicarious engagement in the events that painfully unfold we will be brought to another level of compassionate understanding. If we can see through the “evidence” precided over by Judge Thokozile Masipa and glimpse the more subtle shades of a more layered composition.

There is no facile solution for this tale as old as time reminiscent of ghastly witch hunts and bloody genocide. We may be physically powerful, have enormous wealth, yet we shelter behind security fences and carry guns because we perceive power, like beauty and wealth, as being external. Murder, sanctioned in warfare, is outlawed in suburbia.

Perhaps Oscar Pistorius is not the freakish Minotaur or victorious Blade Runner. Perhaps he is both Victim and Persecutor. Perhaps he is one of us. We will never know what activated the trip wire in the often stormy and competitive relationship (symbolised in their individual and composite chart astrology) between Oscar and Reeva. Was this the old story of Samson and Delia? Was Reeva the persecutor or the scapegoat? Or was it Oscar? How are we the persecutors?

Paranoia, frustration, fear of abandonment, critical words that land with barbs in our soft and tender spots…when we are triggered, each one of us will act out of the reptile brain without the logos or the temperance of the cerebral cortex. When we see ourselves as inherently powerless, the phallic potency of the gun is a lethal weapon against those we fear or wish to harm. If there is a scapegoat there has to be a persecutor – the High Priest, the Judge, the Emperor. Someone we choose because they are identified with the collective values. So, to preserve the stability of our society we must suppress, exclude or destroy those things which threaten the stability and the status quo.

Freud spoke of the Superego. The Inner Judge who passes judgment on our transgressions and has a stern moral code. I imagine that collectively we have judged and found guilty, as we ourselves are guilty of thinking and speaking and acting in ways that have caused others suffering. As the evidence is presented in the trial, the scales of balance will be tipped and justice will be served according to the law of the land and her people. And in this fallen hero and the cast of characters that play on the stage of this tragic drama, we may see our own faces mirrored there darkly.

Midnight Oil – Beds are Burning

How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning
How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning

…The time has come …

April 20, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)

We encounter them in our offices. They live amongst our families. We befriend them online, in our friendship circles. They are the beguiling strangers we meet on our travels. Men and women who leave us depleted, disorientated, disempowered, sucked dry.

They travel in groups. Wan-faced teens with vacant eyes. Pale bodies indelibly stained with tattoos, savagely pierced with shiny metal – fag ends of ancient initiation ceremonies that once embraced and bound neophytes to the tribe. This fragment of tribal belonging so often lacks a spiritual profundity. So they live their lives vicariously, vacuously. Umbilically attached to the iPod.

The vampire is a shadowy figure that has sunk its sharp fangs into myth and legend in every culture for thousands of years. Cursed, defiled, denied, damned, the un-dead reappear in popular culture, often eroticised: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula,True Blood,The Vampire Diaries, Twilight. In modern culture, the vampire is mild mannered, courteous. No ghoul or hideous monster. The scene is always the same. A naive, but always willing victim invites the vampire into the home or bedroom, where it sucks the red life blood from a proffered neck to sustain its own life force. There is a chilling sense of fatal attraction. A passive complicity, an enchantment, as the victim exposes her seductive neck, or lies alluringly asleep. Night after night the Vampire visits. The Victim wavers, weakens. Then, bloodless, transforms into a cadaverous demon ravenous for a fresh source of life-blood. Vampires have lost a connection to their core aliveness. Circumstance, or Fate, has battered their ability to connect with Source, the Divine, leaving them lost, alone, going through the motions of living. In movies, TV series, the old myths are coloured with swooning eroticism. The early recorded stories were very dark and carnal, with brutal destruction of the vampire-turned-victim by the ordinary village folk. In myth and fairy tale the hero or heroine is enchanted. Lost in a dark wood, displaced, far from kith and kin, vulnerable. In poetry, love stories, the unconscious psychic connection between lovers becomes the macabre death-dance of victim and persecutor, as lovers merge, fragile psyches become possessed by these devouring archetypes. John Keats describes this sense of enchantment:
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing… La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Celebrities captivate sycophants into their orbits. Movie stars, singers, models can be literally possessed by the vampire archetype. They feed off their advisors and groupies, the “love” from their audiences, and in turn are devoured, leaving in their wake the detritus of drugs, drink and deception that destroys. Often suicide is the only way to leave the emptiness. We can constellate the vampire archetype in our own lives in the victim- persecutor dance brutally played out in so many relationships. In fear and lack, we may constellate people into our lives who polish our egos, make us feel needed, loved, important for a while… and together we germinate a symbiotic relationship that leaches our joie de vivre, saps our sense of self, sucks out promise, all hope. “Loneliness, physical or spiritual, may allow this complex to manifest. Falling in love is another common way to become vulnerable to this manifestation. Many vampire stories tell of women or men who unwittingly fall in love with a vampire, and after marriage become their victims” writes Bob Johnson.

Studies on incest and paedophilia tap into the vampire archetype. The vampire complex lurks like a hidden virus in families, surfacing again and again in successive generations. Until someone breaks the ties that bind…

Bob Johnson continues, “Vampire lore suggests incest because the most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. His victims are preordained to be those he loved most in life. Modern versions do not always include this element, but it is almost universal in vampire folktales. And so we have the vampire father and mother who must first attack those they love.” James Twitchell, in his book on incest writes about the vampire: “I cannot think of any other monster-molester in our culture who does such terrible things to young victims in such a gentlemanly manner. He is always polite and deferential, and his victim is almost always passive in return.” The deeply disturbing movie, Trust deals with online sexual predators and the shattering of trust in a family as a 14-year-old girl is groomed and lured by the vampiric Charlie.

Not all victims of vampires become vampires in turn. Some survive to write books, appear on talk shows. Young children escape the savage breast of a vampire mothers or a psychically devouring father. Elizabeth Lesser escaped her demon lover and wrote about her experiences in Broken Open. We are not required to become vampires. We allow ourselves to swoon. We stay too long. We deny our instincts. We vacillate, procrastinate, assuage our doubts, wish and hope it will all get better…. It never does. Without a strong sense of authentic self, a spiritual fountainhead that sustains our thirst, a sense of meaning, a philosophy that animates us when events in our lives darken all the silver linings in the clouds, we float in a void, drained of our life force, or sit, waiting at the window. Passively, we vacillate, procrastinate, and loiter in the darkness of our own fear, our own terror of living our lives with blood red passion…

So our holy quest is to discover for ourselves that source of spiritual succour. To connect with our inner world through music, dance, poetry. To discover an activity that gives meaning to our lives. To draw into our lives those relationships that nourish and delight. It takes courage to dismount from the Ferris Wheel of busyness and distraction. Often it is an act of will to sit in a field of daisies, and listen to the whisper of our soul, the heartbeat of the earth. Like Parsifal, we need to ask the right question. And then take action to save ourselves.

Stevie Nick’s lyrics depict the vampiric dance

“Now and others say…. she’s not really real….Like a candle burns bright, wants to burn faster~ well maybe then… at least she really feels.. Burning like a candle in the middle…She’s lonely, lost…she’s disconnected. She finds no comfort in her surroundings. Beautiful, Insecure, she has nothing. She moves from situation to situation…. like a ghost. Then she sees him ….candle burning….”