Facing the Dragon Read online

  Nonetheless, the Hebrew tradition does give you a sense of the religious life as spiritual warfare. The whole idea of taking the land of Israel from its previous occupants is associated with Yahweh God leading his magnificent earthly warrior generals like Moses, Joshua, Deborah, and David. The war is sometimes against the mythic evil enemies Leviathan or Behemoth.

  To understand how the archetype of spiritual warfare works in Judaism, you have to start with David and see his importance to Jewish spirituality. David is the archetypal warrior general leading the armies of Israel into battle against the enemies of Israel. The early image of David fighting Goliath, for instance, shows spiritual warfare at its most archetypal, where the little hero encounters a large evil creature, but wins because he carries a divine blessing.

  Many other traditions have this same motif of a hero fighting an archetypal battle against evil. The heroes may not be as strong as their evil opponents, but with a right heart, they can get assistance even from animals and seemingly chance encounters that give them a critical edge for pulling out a victory at the end.

  Some scholars think the word Pharisee relates to the word Parsi, which refers to the Persian Zoroastrians who fled to India in the eighth century to escape persecution. This evidence may indicate Zoroastrian influence on traditions associated with the Pharisees.

  The Dead Sea Scrolls also may show Zoroastrian influence during the intertestamental period, for their great theme is spiritual warfare. This small sectarian group of Jews believed in a great spiritual battle. They believed they knew where the battle was going to happen, that their own Teacher of Righteousness would lead them in the battle, and that they would receive the materials they needed to win a great victory over the forces of darkness. They were not Christians, but some scholars see similarities between their community and the early Christian communities that taught about Jesus. The idea of a Teacher of Righteousness who would come and lead the community to victory in a great final battle seems very close to the formative imagery in some early Christian writings that would emerge a few years later.

  This material is now available in paperback, The Dead Sea Scriptures, edited by Theodor Gaster (1964). The selections are very readable and straightforward, and many of them are ancient texts unknown before the 1950s. Many of them were preserved in good condition, and there may be others out there in the hills outside Jerusalem. A shepherd found them in jars inside a cave. The material in them is amazing. The beauty of it for our purposes is that you can read this apocalyptic imagery in uncorrupted, unadulterated form: “This is the final battle. The enemy forces are coming in over there. We have to get organized this way. Our Teacher of Righteousness will be our general.” It lays out the organization of the troops and all that sort of thing. It is amazing apocalyptic material.2

  Audience: It sounds like the people who get out their charts and maps and talk about the Battle of Armageddon. A lot of fundamentalist preachers talk about a second coming of Christ when he will come back with a great sword and win a great victory over evil.

  Moore: Yes, it is similar. They come out of the same tradition. There is an archetypal configuration behind all that kind of thinking. The archetype of spiritual warfare deals with apocalyptic images of final warfare. Armageddon is one of the images that came early from that tradition.

  Audience: You mention dualistic traditions but then two divine realities. As one trained in philosophy, I can think in terms of a real split between two realities, like mind and body, or spirit and body, but not between two divine realities, because that puts spirit out there, for example, and evil in here, and isn't that splitting too? Isn't that where a lot of problems come into Christianity?

  Moore: That is the Manichean view that came out of this splitting. Some traditions make the two opposing forces two different gods, while other traditions make one of them God, and one of them Satan, as in some Christian traditions.

  What does Christianity teach about Lucifer? In the myths, Lucifer was the highest ranked of all the angels. The best literature on that is the four-volume set on the cultural and intellectual history of the concept of Satan by Jeffery Burton Russell, a historian at the University of California, and he just happens to appreciate Jungian thought too. That is an extra bonus. The first volume is The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977); the second volume is Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981); the third is Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1984); and the fourth is called Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (1986). Cornell University Press published all four volumes, so you can trace the idea of opposition to God from the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition right up to the present.

  You learn from Russell's work that the history of Christian tradition has a lot more in it about spiritual warfare than you hear in modern churches. You can find it in The City of God by Augustine (354–430), which lays it all out: “There was a rebellion, and Lucifer took with him a whole wing of the divine forces that were loyal to him” (Augustine 1950). This medieval hierarchy of angels is not taught in most seminaries today, not even Catholic seminaries. You can become a Catholic priest today without knowing much about the old medieval hierarchy of angels.

  The medieval writings show a hierarchy at work in the rebellion, just like the movie Star Wars (1977, written and directed by George Lucas). Each of the two groups of forces has a counterpart from the top down. Throughout the medieval angelology you had this kind of layout of spiritual warfare. In both these earlier Christian traditions and Islam, each person has an assigned demon. We all know the folk tradition that everyone has an angel looking out for them, but did you know that you also have your own personal demon assigned to you?

  C. S. Lewis did a similar thing in The Screwtape Letters (1942). You have a demon assigned to you to see if he can disrupt your life, and you also have an angel of life assigned to try to foil the demon. In our popular culture, the comedian Flip Wilson has a routine centered on “the devil made me do it.” We also have popular cartoon art that shows a little devil and a little angel whispering to the main character to get them to do something. We joke about it, but it was no joke in these traditions. They were serious about it.

  Audience: For the apostle Paul in his writings certainly, it was a matter of “powers and principalities,” and spiritual powers always in contention, and of Christians putting on spiritual armor.

  Moore: The “full armor of God” and “the breastplate of righteousness” (see Ephesians 6:10–17). Paul's letters present many images like this in martial terms. Without some historical and contextual background, you would not have the slightest idea what Paul meant by “principalities and powers,” that the apocalyptic struggle involves trans-human forces. Spiritual warfare, in other words, would still be going on in the universe even if there were no human beings in it at all. It is cosmic and occurs at all levels.

  Audience: Madeleine L'Engle in her Time Quartet books deals with that.

  Moore: Tell us about her. Does she write science fiction, or fantasy fiction?

  Audience: She is hard to classify. Madeleine L'Engle was an artist-in-residence at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, and she wrote books that are like kid's books, but publishers wouldn't take them for a long time because they seemed too much like science fiction or fantasy. It didn't quite fit their categories. It was too advanced for kids, and too adolescent for adults. She has one group fighting with cosmic powers on behalf of good, while the other group, the Echthroids, are evil powers threatening to undo creation.3

  Moore: Fantasy fiction and science fiction are the only places you get a powerful representation of this idea today, other than in fundamentalist religious forms like the Islamic radicals or the Christian right.

  Audience: And in Saturday morning cartoons.

  Moore: That's right. You have it clearly represented there. I also think of how Tolkien and C. S. Lewis dealt with spiritual warfare while writing from an archetypal apocalyptic perspective. There is
a lot of literary criticism about this kind of Christian heroic fiction.4

  GNOSTICISM

  Audience: Does Gnosticism fall into this group?

  Moore: Gnosticism in some ways is similar to Manicheanism, but it is not one phenomenon. Gnosticism is a complicated topic. It is based on the idea that there is an esoteric knowledge not shared by everyone. This esoteric knowledge reveals the nature and content of the struggle going on in the world, and what is required to deal with it. The term gnosis (Greek, “knowledge”) means possession of special revealed knowledge needed for your salvation or transformation. The uninitiated, by contrast, walk around without the knowledge they need to know about what is really going on in the world. Paul's writings have a similar idea, because he talks about starting you off with a small amount of elementary knowledge, but not the mature food. “You are babes now, but when you are ready, I can give you more solid food that amounts to advanced mystical understanding, and then you will be able to see what this is all about.”5

  The orthodox Christian tradition declared Gnosticism a heresy largely because it made the body and the world evil, and that is a heresy. Orthodox theology considers Jesus both fully divine and fully human, which means he really had a body and he really died. Gnostics tried to say, “No, he didn't really have a body, or if he had a body, then he didn't really die.” That comes from the Manichean tradition that considered the body evil. It influenced Augustine and caused a lot of antagonism toward sexuality and the body in Christian tradition.

  The key to Gnosticism is not the archetype of spiritual warfare but the archetype of initiation, as seen in New Age occult groups that show a lot of gnostic emphasis today. The main theme of the New Age movement is initiation, and it tones down any idea of spiritual warfare (see Moore 2001). Although using New Age crystals might seem to relate to the imagery of light and darkness, their devotees really don't want to talk about the shadow side of life or any life-threatening struggle against evil.

  Here the New Age point of view differs greatly from the Jungian point of view. New Age people sometimes celebrate Carl Jung in a shallow sort of way, but they are not really Jungians when they refuse to face the shadow side of human society and personality. No Jungian worthy of the name, who tries to stand in the tradition pioneered by Carl Jung, would ever underestimate the power of evil. That was one of his main gifts. We need to collect everything Jung said about evil in one volume, because that has not been done yet, and then we can see better how much importance he put on dealing with it, and how different Jungians are from people who do not take evil seriously (see Stein 1995).

  Gnosticism does draw some from the Persian tradition, but from the Jungian point of view you have to ask the prior question, “What archetypal structures in the psyche does Gnosticism draw on?” It certainly draws on the archetype of spiritual warfare, but you would need to know a lot about it to see how it works. Many people who talk about Gnosticism do not know much about this tradition of spiritual warfare, because it is not very popular. They do not want to talk about such things, because that is what fundamentalists talk about.

  Audience: From reading The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, you get things like Jesus being quoted as saying, “If I tell you what is inside me and bring it forth, then that will save me, and if I do not bring forth what is inside me, that is what will kill me.” In other words, it puts everything inside, an interesting twist from a psychological point of view, because it seems to address the whole shadow thing, but it may seem foolish to the guy being mugged, or knifed to death, that anything inside could be the source of these kinds of problems.

  Moore: Yes, that is the fantasy that you brought all your problems down on yourself. We'll talk later about what we all have inside us that needs to be brought forth consciously.

  There are many good treatments of Gnosticism. The book by Elaine Pagels (1979) is wonderful, as well as The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James Robinson (1990). Hans Jonas wrote The Gnostic Religion (1958), which gives a lot of the historical background from the intertestamental period. June Singer (1987) has a good chapter on Gnosticism in the book that Murray Stein and I co-edited on Jung's Challenge to Contemporary Religion (1987).

  This brings us to consider the nature of the task involved in understanding and dealing with the enemy in spiritual warfare. Later we will look at some psychological interpretations of the task and discuss the personal and archetypal aspects of the shadow, before concluding with some observations on how these archetypal realities might be relevant in therapy.

  THE WARRIOR FUNCTION

  The Japanese tradition says some interesting things about spiritual warfare. For people who are studying the warrior archetype, I like to recommend a popular management book called Waging Business Warfare by David Rogers (1988). It explains how the Japanese samurai tradition embodied the Japanese fascination with war and the warrior. The samurai were medieval Japanese knights who developed a form of fencing with swords into a martial art called Kendo that emphasized spiritual warfare. Kendo means “the way of the sword,” but it teaches that the greatest enemy of the great swordsmen is an inner enemy, the ego, and that before you cut anything or anyone else, you must cut your own ego. I was fortunate to have a black belt Kendo practitioner as a friend who helped me realize how Japanese martial arts embodied this philosophy.

  Many other traditions also contain the idea of dealing with the inner enemy before you deal with the outer enemy. Islam, for example, has the concept of jihad. Contrary to what many people think, Islam teaches there are two jihads, two spiritual warfares that are basically the same but linked inwardly. Mohammed is quoted as saying that the lesser jihad is the fight against evil and unrighteousness out there in the world, while the greater jihad is the war against evil within, the part of you that tries to make you unfaithful and not a loyal servant of Allah and truth and justice.

  Many traditional teachers had a sophisticated understanding that “facing the dragon” was a primal inner struggle of spiritual life, though with many outer expressions as well. It was never merely inner, never merely a matter of “integrating your shadow.” We have much work to do in the outer world as well.

  You should all be familiar with the archetype of the hero and how the functioning of the hero archetype is imaged in the context of a cataclysmic struggle. Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is a wonderful treatment of hero mythology (see also Miller 2000). Jungians talk a lot about the hero as the archetypal ground of the developing ego in a personality, how the hero struggles greatly against the forces of unconsciousness. Some people say the hero in masculine psychology struggles mainly against the regressive pull of the mother complex, but that is an unfortunate way to think about it, for it also involves the regressive pull to remain in the great “cloud of unknowing” and thus in denial of the destructive forces both within and without.

  Human beings have an enormous desire not to know. It is very painful to know. If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down. It is the most popular one. Unconsciousness is difficult to deal with, and it takes a heroic struggle in the psyche to develop a strong ego. Certainly anything like an adequate ego function is not automatic. If you have evaluated your own ego function lately, you know that even after much therapy and struggle it is difficult to get yourself conscious and stay awake. This is the primal deep reality in this whole issue of spiritual warfare. It is a struggle against unconsciousness.

  Consider, though, how the archetype of the hero differs from the archetype of the warrior. The hero archetype is fundamentally an image of adolescence and the struggle against unconsciousness, so you would not want the hero in charge of all your legions. He might make a good leader after his heroic struggle, but during the struggle itself, he is still trying to come to maturity. The hero journeys toward maturity and responsibility, but until he gets there, he is like the Tom Cruise character in the movie Top Gun (1986). For all of his str
ong characteristics, he cannot be a good flight commander for your air force until he gets some aging and savvy, confronts his grandiosity, and learns more about cooperation and teamwork.

  Good warriors, by contrast, have full command of their resources, their gifts, and their abilities, and they can mobilize them, organize them, channel them, and direct them in the service of transpersonal commitments toward transpersonal goals. Studying the history and mythology of generalship also provides a sense of the true warrior's mature deployment of forces and resources in a significant struggle. The true warrior represents mature ego function.6

  How does the warrior archetype function in the psyche? People without solid relatedness to the warrior within cannot deploy themselves well in whatever they have to do in life. To get it clear psychologically, they go into enormous amounts of ineffectual self-defeating and passive-aggressive behavior. When you relate adequately to your archetypal warrior within, whether you are male or female, you will be more effective and have less trouble with depression. Other people, however, may have more trouble with your aggression!

  Try this clinically with the people you are working with. Try to help them in their warrior function. Help them get organized and focused, making plans, solving problems, making strategic and tactical decisions, and moving on them, and see how depressed they stay. You will immediately notice they get less depressed. But to the extent that people cannot act or coordinate action, they will be depressed, passive-aggressive, and anxious.