Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Read online

  I would like to thank IPCS and the Northern Star Foundation for underwriting the costs of the preparation of the many drafts that were to become this book. Appreciation goes to Eva Salmons for careful transcription of my lectures. To Max Havlick, my gifted editor at New World Community Enterprises, goes the credit for bringing a variety of materials from lectures and seminars into a coherent, integrated, and understandable manuscript. The remaining awkwardness of my efforts at prose is solely my responsibility. With Robert Bly and John Lee encouraging me, I hope to improve my writing in the next decade!

  I also want to thank Murray Stein and Siobhan Drummond of Chiron Publications for their interest in this book and their willingness to aid me in bringing these reflections to a public struggling to make sense of the current epidemic of interreligious hatred and violence.

  Finally, I want to thank my wife Margaret, who continues to be an exciting and challenging partner in exploring the many and fascinating ways in which Jung's psychology aids us all in opening to a larger, more loving, and radiantly human life.

  —Robert Moore

  CHAPTER 1

  The Lucifer Complex and the Enemy Within

  Psychological Reflections on Human Evil

  THOMAS BRUNNER (2000) RECENTLY COMPARED MY work with that of Thomas Moore and characterized it as follows: “While Thomas Moore's books may be sifted down into the maxim, ‘the sacred is closer than you think,’ Robert Moore's books exhibit the central idea that ‘the demonic is closer than you think.’” This distinction misses some of the subtleties of my understanding of the important connection between the sacred and evil, but it does accurately characterize the urgency of my concern that we as individuals, groups, political and cultural tribes, and as a species, quickly come to a more adequate dynamic understanding of the great solar fires that operate unconsciously within us to drive the increasing epidemics of personal and social evil.

  Why do I emphasize the dynamics of human evil in my research and teaching in psychology and spirituality?1 Because any approach to spirituality that hopes to confront the personal and communal destructiveness threatening the human future must avoid several traps. First, we must avoid the New Age tendency to deny the reality and power of evil. This widespread “flight into the light” is particularly tempting today because it requires so little in the way of either reflection or action. It enables continued denial of the seriousness of the situation, and denial of how we as individuals participate in our own destruction, and the destruction of our communities and planet.

  Second, we must avoid the historically popular tendency to find a human “other” to serve as a scapegoat for explanation of the impact of evil in our lives, one who can serve as a receptacle for our shadow projections, and who, if they are imprisoned, tortured, burned, bombed, and so forth, can be used as ritual sacrificial victims to give us a bogus sense of mastery over our desperate situation. These misguided strategies were ably discussed by Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil (1985) and The Denial of Death (1975). Racism, classism, anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, and other misguided tribalisms have majored in this seductive but demonic attempt to locate and suppress or destroy the “toxins” that afflict us.

  Sexism has been a historic and even more ubiquitous strategy for finding a scapegoat. Both men and women must share the responsibility for starting to break the historic pattern of blaming the other gender for human destructiveness and evil. As some feminist theorists have pointed out, the different genders may experience different patterns of temptation or vulnerability to various forms of sin or evil, but neither one should continue to explain evil by reference to gender. Both genders and persons of all classes, races, religions, and sexual preferences participate in the experience of evil, and all are responsible for its perpetuation. All must respond to the challenge of coming to an understanding of evil that is neither naïve nor grounded in scapegoating of the other, but which may account for some of the forces of destructiveness that threaten to destroy us.

  WHAT ARE THE MARKS OF HUMAN EVIL?

  Being able to talk with any authority about evil is not one of the strengths of modern “flatland” secular culture. Take, for example, the case of the Holocaust. Witness how difficult we have found it to face our tendency to split off our consciousness of the Holocaust, to avoid looking at it, to let our denial of the reality and power of its evil overwhelm us either by minimizing or trivializing the significance of the war against the Jews. Responses range from absolving the Germans of their responsibility for the Holocaust to forcing the German people to carry the collective shadow for the whole human species. We hate to admit the fact that the genocidal impulse is species-wide. Even Hannah Arendt's emphasis on the “banality of evil” in the Holocaust experience has made it easier for us to engage in massive denial of the power and pervasiveness of radical evil in human experience.

  Modern theologians have, for the most part, been little help. Recent theology tends to discuss theodicy: Can God be a good God, given the manifest evil in the world? Long discussions usually focus on the nature and limits of the power of God, and whether or not God wills evil or merely permits it, willingly or unwillingly. Thousands of pages elucidate the various perspectives one might take on such issues. Scholars with a philosophical bent may find some of these discussions interesting and provocative, but they tend not to be, as we say today, “experience near.” They seem rather to treat evil as if it were merely an interesting academic issue for discussion in graduate-level seminars.

  This is a classic way of responding to evil by those who have not achieved an adequate warrior initiation.2 Contemporary philosophers and theologians differ from the shamans of tribal culture in their lack of maturation in the warrior line of psychological and spiritual development. In contrast to our modern clergy and psychotherapists, not to speak of our professors, the great tribal shamans knew that their roles as healers and spiritual leaders required them to be warriors as well. Tribal peoples also treated these issues in a sophisticated way in their mythologies. While we obviously need to get beyond the limitations of tribal perspectives, we also need to ask if there is not significant wisdom for us in the ancient narrative traditions about evil.

  Tribal peoples saw careful thinking about the nature and dynamics of evil as a serious practical matter central to personal and communal existence and critical to the survival of the human community. I do not share the view of many scholars today who ascribe this interest to primitive superstition or to the effects of sociopolitical structures of domination. Contemporary “scholarly” dismissals of premodern tribal wisdom on these issues are as arrogant, grandiose, and inflated as they are ubiquitous. Contemporary theologians are, for the most part, no more appreciative of these traditions from folklore and mythology than the secular, reductionistic social and behavioral scientists. Long before a few contemporary theologians began to rediscover the centrality of mythic narratives in articulating spiritual truth, tribal peoples had spent thousands of years perfecting mythic narrative and storytelling as ways to provide in-depth understanding of the nature and dynamics of the human experience of evil.3 I agree with Carl Jung that we must return to mine this ancient wisdom of the human mythic imagination if we are to regain an adequate capacity to discern and confront the presence and power of human evil today.

  EVIL IN FOLKLORE AND MYTHOLOGY

  From an extensive comparative study of ancient wisdom traditions I have distilled the following list of assumptions they held about the nature and dynamics of evil:

  Evil is a reality with an agency of its own.

  The presence of evil can be felt in the enchanting power of denial on individual, familial, cultural levels, the seductive power of what the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich called “dreaming innocence.”

  The chief tactic of evil is to present the human individual and community with a false, deceptive representation of reality. In short, it lies.

  Evil, therefore, has the capacity to clothe and disguise itself in forms t
hat seem innocent, good, or at least justified, and have a seductive attractiveness.

  Being near this evil enchantment causes you to lose your powers of discernment and vigilance, and your spiritual and moral light grows dim. Its influence is contagious. Tribal peoples around the world recognized this danger and built elaborate systems of taboo and ritual “insulation” against it.

  An evil presence can get inside your community, family, home, and body, and even into your psyche, before you realize the danger exists. It is already “in the house” by the time you realize you have a problem.

  Once inside, evil begins to erode the foundations of personal and social life by presenting itself as the true center of life. It functions as a “black hole,” a powerful vortex that, in effect, attacks Being itself. This is the human reality behind the biblical injunction against idolatry, “You shall have no other gods before me.” We can read it this way, “You shall not create bogus or pseudocenters for your life and society.”

  Evil multiplies itself on your energy, your lifeblood, your creativity. It co-opts your good and often magnificent energies and potentials, and makes them serve hatred, sadism, oppression, and the destruction of health and life. It recruits and diverts the energies of life and creativity into the service of death.

  Evil denies the reality of death and all human limitations. It makes an insatiable, limitless quest the substitute for legitimate expansion of the individual self. It puts polymorphous desires and pleasures in place of a social concern for community and the consequences of one's actions. It infects us with what Kierkegaard called “the sickness of infinitude.”

  The presence of evil can be seen in its effects on the persons and community around it. It is not simply an idea or an absence of some positive quality. It is an active, aggressive, antilife force that attacks the health and vitality of everyone around it. “You shall know them by their fruits.”

  These insights caused many cultures to describe the phenomenology of evil with mythic images of a vampire that thrives on the absence of light (see Shanahan 1994). You are most vulnerable to it when you are the most disconnected from your relationships and trying to cope with your life and problems alone. It manifests great intelligence, as if it has lived many lifetimes and has methodically developed a capacity to detect and exploit personal weaknesses and blind spots. It preys in a seductive way on your rightful need for attention and recognition that is not in itself demonic. It captures your love and turns it into necrophilia. It captures your legitimate assertiveness and turns it into sadism. It captures your knowledge and uses it for deception, greed, and antisocial manipulation. It captures your desire to nurture and turns it into domination and oppression.

  In contemporary culture, even when many theologians have become lost in their own enchanted “innocence,” the intuitive understanding of evil expresses itself in an extraordinary way in such movies as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Exorcist, Cape Fear, the Alien series, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Andromeda Strain, Silkwood, and many others.

  Consider, for example, the recent remake by John Carpenter of the science fiction classic The Thing (1982), starring Kurt Russell. In an isolated arctic outpost some scientists discover a space ship in the ice. The wreck has been buried there for centuries. Lying dormant in the wreckage is an alien creature with the capacity to change forms, invade, and attach in a parasitical way to other life forms to increase its size and strength while destroying the individuality of those life forms it co-opts and colonizes. The first group of scientists to discover the wreckage are naïve about the potential risks to themselves and do not take proper precautions. Their research colony is “contaminated” by the alien and, though they fight back, all except one man are killed by the alien.

  When the movie begins, we see a dog approaching our camp, being chased across the tundra and fired upon by a man in a helicopter. The dog runs into the camp and mixes with our dogs. The man in the helicopter lands, shouts in a seemingly berserk way, and continues to fire at the dog until others respond by shooting and killing him. Only much later do we learn that the alien had infected the dog and the man was trying to kill the dog to prevent the infection from spreading. People did not understand his mission, so he was killed instead.

  As the movie progresses, one individual after another is contaminated by contagion with “the thing,” and their naiveté about its presence makes it impossible for them to protect themselves. The shaman-warrior consciousness finally manifests in Kurt Russell's character who does the investigation necessary to discover the reality of the radical danger posed by the intruder. He is horrified to find that the alien is already in the camp and has found a way to invade the human body without being seen. Only a blood testing by fire can determine the presence of the infection.

  As the contagion in the camp spreads, the various sources of heat and light are gradually destroyed. The shamanic warrior figure realizes that “the thing” must be contained at any cost, including his own life. At the end of the movie he faces the horror of “the thing” with only his steely resolve and fire as a weapon. The audience gets a sense of the incredible magnitude of the power and malignant agency of the power of evil that infected the human community. Though we are shaken by the power, resourcefulness, and focused intentionality of the demonic presence, we still admire the valiant courage of the human response once the radical nature of the situation was discerned.

  While the movie picks up the ancient themes of invasion and contagion by evil, its ending reflects the contemporary tendency toward hopelessness about the power of evil. This probably explains why we prefer to deny evil rather than to face it, because we see little possibility of overcoming it.

  This underscores my point that folklore and mythology contain the deepest, wisest, and most sustained reflections we have on evil and what to do about it. In contrast to recent, more shallow understandings of evil as merely a willful choosing to act destructively, tribal cultures were clear about the radical reality, power, and ego-alien agency of evil. They had a deep sense of evil as possession, as having a cause or agency beyond the conscious ego, one that seduces individuals into states of enchantment that compromise their ability to liberate themselves or even realize the destructiveness of their behavior.

  Even more importantly, the myths of tribal cultures also saw the human potential for discerning, understanding, confronting, and liberating the human community from possession by evil. Liberation, usually seen as a form of exorcism, required consultation with the shaman or sorcerer and an appeal to the concern and action of the wider community. Powers beyond the individual person and family had to be brought to bear on the toxic, enchanting influences until the individual could be restored to normal human functioning.

  In short, traditional societies spent far more time trying to understand and combat evil than does contemporary society. Modern culture has managed to make itself so blind to the reality of evil that it has become almost incapable of discerning the magnitude of its threat to the human future. How else can we explain the pervasive denial of evil that dominates our time? By turning away from the resources of the mythic imagination, we have stripped ourselves of the capacity to cut through our denial of the destructive forces that we face.

  RESOURCES FROM PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTION

  But wait, are we not simply romanticizing and mystifying tribal cultures? Is there any contemporary evidence to support the idea that the engines of radical evil come from outside the human ego, that evil is really a possession and enchantment of the human self, and not simply a misguided conscious act of an otherwise perfectly rational and intact human ego? Has psychoanalysis, for instance, discovered anything remotely resembling the traditional views of evil?

  Viewed cross-culturally, the traditional views support the existence of what we might call a “Lucifer complex” that threatens to seduce and possess the human ego consciousness. In some cultures, this toxic alien presence is conceptualized as demons, in others as idolatry, in others as t
he power of the temptations of illusion and desire. This presence usually promises both significance and satisfaction of desire, the eclipse of limitations, and the ability to become the center of the world. Its final outcome is almost universally recognized as hubris, madness, and a resulting destruction of the human community and human life.

  Several different schools of psychoanalysis have indeed provided concepts and compelling clinical evidence for reappropriating the traditional views of evil with renewed respect and appreciation. Not only have they discovered evidence of such a reality, but they have provided unprecedented revolutionary ways to understand the widespread nature of this phenomenon in human life, that it is not only a tribal reality, but a human, species-wide one.

  Contemporary psychoanalytic studies of the nature and dynamics of narcissism relate directly to traditional understandings of the dynamics of human evil. Heinz Kohut and the psychoanalytic self psychologists were not the first to discover the destructive results of pathological infantile grandiosity. A careful scrutiny of various schools of psychoanalytic psychology reveals general belief in the presence in the human psyche of what I call the “Great Self Within,” a very real inner presence that is not the same as a healthy human self or ego, but can take possession of an ego and drive it to fragmentation and total destruction.4 This “Great Self Within,” also called the god-complex or the god-imago, has sometimes been equated with Satan or the devil, but it is much more complex than the imago of Satan. It is not evil in itself, even though it does fuel the Luciferian tendency.

  Later chapters will discuss how unconscious identification with this inner reality can lead both into possession states and splitting of the human psyche. Here we will tour the history of psychoanalysis for clues to the reality of the “Great Self Within.” Depth psychologists from Freud to Kohut observed a tendency for the human ego to be overwhelmed by “grandiose,” godlike claims grounded in psychological systems beyond the awareness of the ego.