THE CRY OF MERLIN

This series of group-talks will deal with the contemporary condition of the shadow problem, the shadow as it exists in the world today, both personal and collective. We will approach our subject in terms of concepts, descriptions, and practical means of addressing the personal and collective shadow. In this first talk, I will address basic questions about the concepts and the practical process of working with the shadow, I will try to lay down a basic wide and loose framework which will provide some tools for conceptually and practically addressing the shadow, personal and collective. You may be aware that the subject of the shadow in Jungian psychology, more than most aspects Jungian psychology, tends to be restricted to clinical work, private therapeutic work. It is not as popular or familiar a subject as many other Jungian ideas are, for obvious reasons. The subject of the shadow tends to draw the line between real work within a Jungian context and merely playing with Jungian concepts in an ultimately frivolous manner. And it is not difficult to find statements by Jungians implying or stating outright that working with the shadow is risky and should be restricted to work with a qualified therapist or analyst. That is an understandable attitude, but at the same time it has become an attitude that is simply not realistic for two reasons: 1, too many people, the large majority of the population, in fact, simply can’t afford that kind of therapy even if they were willing to enter into it and this doesn’t even touch on the problem of ensuring the quality of the therapy itself, and, 2, the problem of the shadow, both personal and collective, is urgent, even overflowing, in our present day world, so that it simply has to be dealt with beyond the narrow confines of conventional therapy. A responsible attitude leaves us no choice, though at the same time this attitude certainly doesn’t give us a ready made answer for how this can be done. And I have to admit that it concerns me greatly that the development of circumstances will certainly force the subject of the shadow into the popular arena and there will be people prepared to exploit it in shallow and dangerous ways for personal gain. I have already become aware of some books that I would place in this category. One of the great and still drifting dreams of my life is to help create a way to give large numbers of people a primary, non-doctrinaire, psychological education so they can live their lives more self-reliantly and in relation with each other in a therapeutic manner so that they don’t necessarily need a “therapist” in a conventional sense of that word. Within that interest of mine is the belief that this problem of the limited reach of conventional private therapy is unfortunately accompanied by the fact that, as far as I can discern, none of the major religions of the world ( Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or the new Paganism) are really preparing people for what is coming into our world experience due to our psychological condition, which is a catastrophic collision of multiple belief systems, instead they are concerned solely with perpetuating, with an eye toward dominance, their own religious belief and perspective which reveals that they are in the grip of the shadow’s power-drive. Now all of these religions will claim that they believe in religious tolerance, but it is just a formality, a polite rhetoric spoken by the persona, because the fact of the matter is that underneath this rhetoric is the belief that their own religion is the absolute Truth and therefore the other person’s belief can be nothing other than a lie, a falsehood, and a lie can be tolerated at best only temporarily. It is only a matter of time until Truth itself disposes of the lie, which means that it is only a matter of time until there is war in one form or another. (Please recall that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all apocalyptic religions with conflicting scenarios about how history will be played out and concluded.) And because all of these religions believe that they are without doubt the absolute truth, that means, by definition, that they have no shadow. There can be no shadow in Truth. So what this really means is that they are blind to their shadow. Now many individuals within these religions may be quite conscious of their own imperfection within the context of their religion, but they see no imperfections in the religion itself, they do not see the shadow of the religion, the shadow of their god or goddess and therefore in the name of that religion, of that god or goddess, they can take a righteous hostile enemy stance against the non-believer and be perfectly justified. They can even kill in the name of their perfect, shadow-less religion regardless of their own personal imperfection. A perfect religion covers a multitude of un-atoned sins. And adding to this problem is the fact that if you have been persecuted at some point in your history, and all of these religions, the Christian, the Judaic, the Islamic, The Hindu, and the Pagan, have been persecuted at some point, then you become even more emotionally convinced of your own truth and even more blind to your own collective shadow. Actually getting a collective conscious grip on this world shadow problem that would be more than merely conceptual would entail an enormous re-education and re-structuring of society. That sort of education would obviously be a more than gargantuan task, and I can’t go into that right now, but I will say that it is also obvious that for us here to look at the problem of the shadow, personal and collective, in a practical way will necessarily take us into areas that go beyond a merely conceptual and theoretical level. If we are going to talk about the shadow from a practical standpoint, then we are inviting, to some degree, actual conscious contact with the shadow and not just concepts and theories about it. So I personally feel obliged to offer some basic material that would hopefully be useful for anyone who should decide to take this seriously in a personal way and who, for whatever reasons, will not be in therapy. And I want to clearly state my own view that working with the shadow is difficult and demanding work, but if you are an ordinary neurotic person and not someone with more serious mental problems and if you take a long-term, dedicated, and responsible attitude toward it, working with the shadow outside of therapy can be very fruitful for you personally and for those who are in relationship with you. But part of the proper responsible attitude toward this is accepting from the beginning that this work will change you and you must be prepared to create space in your life for these changes to unfold which you will not be able to identify exactly before they come. And, you must accept that though with hard work visible improvement and gratification can be expected, this work with the shadow will certainly not find anything like perfection in your lifetime. The reason for this is that the shadow exists on such a wide span of levels: ranging from the content of your personal unconscious which can be brought into consciousness with relative ease, and then assimilated if one is willing to do that demanding work, all the way to shadow as archetypal form which can be experienced with great benefit but can never be assimilated or integrated in the same way by consciousness precisely because it is archetypal and not personal. So, in one way or another, to one degree or another, this work will go on for the rest of your life. But the benefit coming from accepting this task, to you and others, will make it all worthwhile., however imperfect. And finally I would like to say before beginning that I am solely responsible for what I am saying here, I represent no one but myself, and I accept that responsibility.

I want to start by saying that the shadow is one of the most difficult subjects in Jungian psychology to discuss because it branches off into so many things that are so difficult to bring together into a condensed statement. The shadow is the only item in Jungian psychology that lies naturally, as I already said, within both the personal and the collective unconscious. Are you aware of that? If we imagine a model of the totality of the psyche, we might imagine it as encircling layers of psychic reality. If we start with ego-centered consciousness, then the next layer would be the shadow, then the anima and animus, then the collective unconscious and the archetypal world. Though I make the anima and animus a separate layer here, they are really a sort of representational gateway into and are part of the collective unconscious. So it sort of goes beyond this layers model. But something that goes beyond this layers-model even more than that is the fact that this shadow layer beginning in the personal unconscious, though in relation to the ego it precedes the anima/animus layer in a very real structural and experiential way, that is, the ego cannot have deliberate conscious contact with the anima or animus without first contacting the shadow, this shadow also extends into the collective unconscious to an archetypal level. So the shadow is the only thing that reaches from the personal unconscious all the way to the archetypal self. So the shadow is a very difficult thing to talk about on a small-scale such I am forced into here. So this layers-model is both valid and not valid. Both! So we are partly dealing with a non-rational thing here. Not an irrational thing, a non-rational thing. So we have to expect that in working with it, working with the shadow, or any other part of it, things are not going to proceed in a simply linear rational fashion. The process will have progress, but not in a simply linear way. This ring on my middle finger has a line that proceeds forward, but it does so in a non-linear way. It moves forward in a linear way then it ceases to be linear and circles in upon itself so when it emerges again it both is and is not the same line that preceded the circling. You will approach the shadow in a linear manner and when contact is made self-enclosing circles will form and when you re-emerge you will both be and not be the same person who both is and is not on the same path which is and is not in the same world. So let’s go to square one, or something like square one, and let me tell you that my talk is going to progress like the line on my ring and you have to be prepared to go back and forth and in and out, so let me tell you now the main points that I will touch on and you will have those as means of keeping bearings. I will talk about ego-consciousness in relation to the shadow and how that in turn relates to the anima/animus and how all that in turn relates to self/totality and within that self/totality the particular question of evil. Our central subject is properly relating to the shadow.

First of all, why do we want, as far as that is possible, to assimilate or integrate the shadow? My answer to that question is: To diminish the possibility of the shadow’s power-drive inflicting suffering and destruction on whatever stands in the path of its reach for power; and, to increase the conscious capacity for relationship and creativity and move more toward a real wholeness. An individual who has not gone some distance in integrating the shadow, that is, become conscious of his or her shadow and held it in consciousness, cannot actually relate to the reality of other individuals in a lasting and meaningful way and also cannot be truly creative in a manner that has lasting meaning. Talent and skill alone do not guarantee meaningful creativity. I will add here my belief that proper work with the shadow is the only thing that will keep the realities that we will have to deal with in our unfolding present day world from becoming disastrous. So the question arises: What does it really mean to properly address the shadow? What does this work actually involve?

To genuinely integrate shadow material, or anything else from the unconscious, means that that material must be understood both (both!) intellectually, that is, in a mature discriminating way, and in terms of its feeling-value. This means that integrating the shadow in a man will involve consciously opening to the anima-eros reality and in a woman it will mean consciously opening to the animus-logos reality. A man who tries to understand the shadow only intellectually will find himself confronted by opposing feeling in the anima and the woman who tries to understand the shadow only according to feeling value will find her ego confronted by logos attacks from her animus. So, addressing the shadow, in addition to the difficult moral challenge that presents in itself, always involves the anima in a man and the animus in a woman and not opening to this will result in impasse and problems of various degrees of severity for the ego. It may not be clear why I am bringing the anima and animus into this subject and I will come back to this and go into it more deeply. But for now let me just say that really integrating the shadow requires forging an attitude in the ego consciousness that I call ‘the harness of opposites’. You must develop the rare and difficult discipline of putting both these opposing forces, these seemingly opposing forms of understanding, into the same harness to really get where you need to go in this work with the shadow, that is, toward some genuine wholeness. I will come back to that, but I also want to say here that there is an even deeper issue in this shadow work related to this idea of wholeness, of what we really mean by ‘wholeness’ and how that touches on the difficult subject of evil which the subject of human wholeness must finally address in some form. I will go into that further too, but we need to work our way up to all that deeper material by beginning with more simple things so we have a ground to work on.

This idea of addressing the shadow obviously implies that you are looking at, turning your attention to, the shadow. Well, you cannot get a person to look at their shadow unless they are already consciously looking for a deeper and truer way of life. That place in a human being where the decision is made to turn more toward truth is a secret place, no one can tell you where it is, or exactly how or why the decision is made by one person and not by another. It remains one of the troubling mysteries of human existence. But unless that decision is made the person will not look at their shadow, they will not allow conscious contact to be made with the shadow. But on the other hand, if that conscious decision to turn more toward truth has been made then the person will inevitably come into conscious contact with their shadow. So if you have made the decision to move deeper into truth in your life, then you don’t have to worry about how to find the shadow, because it will find you. It will get right up in your face, as the popular expression has it. There are two reasons for this: 1, recall from my previous talk about the shadow that I said that part of what makes up the shadow are your own inferior characteristics and aspects that you keep pushed away in the unconscious and that potentially pose a threat to yourself and to other people though we don’t like to think of ourselves in such terms. Now if you have made the decision to increase your conscious contact with truth and to allow yourself to be accordingly changed by that contact, then inevitably your own inferiorities are going to become even more solid and visible obstacles in your path toward that goal; 2, there are actually things in your shadow that you need for this desired transformation toward truth to take place.

So let us say that your decision to change came because you have realized that you are caught in certain futile patterns, adaptations, and complexes. Well, as you try to turn away from these patterns, adaptations, and complexes, the shadow will confront you and you will begin to experience what seems like some degree of fragmentation or disunity in yourself. Part of the reason for this feeling of disunity is that even though you say you want to change, the ego consciousness will at first want to be something different without having to go through painful changes. It will merely imagine or fantasize the desired change in itself as something real and the shadow will rise up and confront it with the fact that it is not real and that the shadow is going to have its say in this process of change toward truth. And another reason for this feeling of disunity is that the shadow is something different from the ego consciousness which has made contact with it. So this brings up the question of how the shadow will appear, what forms it will take. Of course I can’t tell you exactly how you will experience the shadow. I can only tell you about what I have experienced and about the experience of others that I know of, but I can tell you that it may well appear in ways that you do not recognize as such. You may have experiences in the form of dreams, fantasies, moods, bodily sensations that are all very unpleasant and seem merely like extremely annoying, disturbing, and unnecessary obstacles on your path to a more truth-oriented life. But they are probably the shadow confronting you in various ways. You have to pay close attention to these troublesome things and not just think about ways you can get around them or rid of them so you can move on to the truth. You have to be open and engaged and very bright about this. Remember, this is your path, you are the one who is working here, so you must be present and vigilant. If you have made the energetic decision to pursue truth and then find yourself in a depression that won’t let go of you and you find yourself caught up in emotions over it, then I guarantee you that you have encountered your shadow. And the thing to do at that point is not to retreat into old comforting habits, patterns, and complexes which you just so recently decided to do something about, nor do you want to give yourself a shallow pep talk about keeping on the sunny side, always on the sunny side. No. Though you did not expect such a thing, precisely because of your decision to turn boldly toward truth the sun has gone down and when it next rises it will not be even more yellow and bright as ego consciousness is hoping for because of its decision to pursue truth, it will be shadowy or even black and if you listen closely you will hear the shadow say, Welcome to my world. And you must accept the invitation, you must not decline, because you know damn well that the only other place you have to go is back to that old place that you have already realized is not where you want to be. Or you may be tempted to believe that maybe you can regress even further back, say into childhood, or even the womb in some form, and you may well find this comforting for a while, but it will only be even more painful when you are forced out into the real world again. When you encounter the shadow you must soberly accept its invitation. It will smile and greet you with a sting and say very nasty things about you that are all true and it will find ways to frighten you. And you may feel a very deep disunity in yourself. But you have to be a brave, mature, grown-up ego and remember that what you are confronted with here is only an aspect of your own greater self, not something alien, and part of what we are after here is self-knowledge, and so you must say, ok, here I am, and then all hell will break loose in the form of a dialogue between the ego and the shadow. In the course of this dialogue you may experience surges of energy that want to take the form of rebellion against the prevalent hierarchical order around you. The ego may want to resist this rebellion by trying, as I said, to revert to the old order, the old pattern where the complexes will re-assert themselves. But you can’t let that happen, you have to find an acceptable way to let this rebellious energy assert itself, though it may not be acceptable to everyone around you. You may experience unusual, unfamiliar body-sensation reactions to this disruption that you may try to defend your self against by intellectualizing the experience, but you have to just let it be what it is and experience these feelings though they may well be disturbing or even frightening. You may feel afraid that you could go crazy or you may feel paralyzed with confusion, but you have to trust in the value of what you are doing and move on. You may look for someone to rescue you, and though there is certainly nothing wrong with appropriate support in this struggle, precisely what you do not need is to be rescued which would only guarantee that the shadow will not be integrated. You may feel at times like you could lose yourself in wild behavior, even frenzied behavior. And you may need to actually experience this to some degree, but you must remain discriminating and understand that there is a capacity for evil here and you have to remember that this is a dialogue here and not a matter of simply letting the shadow have its way. You have to stand up for yourself and your values as well as listening openly to the shadow. You may also, along this same line, experience very unusual aggressive or erotic energies that have to be expressed in a way that must also keep in mind the possibility of harm to yourself and others. As I already said, you may become very depressed and you have to understand that the only way to break through this depression is to go more deeply into it both in terms of discriminating understanding and in terms of feeling-value in relation to the specific content of your shadow as you experience it in dreams, fantasies, moods, bodily sensations, and hopefully you will also decide to experience it in active imagination. Now something else you must be very careful about is that though your well-functioning capacity for discriminating understanding is truly necessary in this work, you might be tempted at some point, because of the discomfort you are feeling, to allow this form of understanding to conceptualize a solution to some particular aspect of the disunity you are feeling and you may believe in this conceptual solution with an understandable emotion that allows you to mistake it for a real solution while it is actually only a picture of a possible solution that you may well at some point actually achieve, but if it is achieved it will be a ‘felt’ solution that changes your life and not just a conceptual solution. It can be a painful experience to carry around a cherished conceptual solution and have it popped like a bubble by harsh experience and then be forced to see that you are not really living this solution and you feel lost again. And in addition to all this difficulty of having to staying strong and alert and avoiding traps set by the shadow and resisting the ego’s desire to bail out, I should also add that the effort to integrate the shadow will also bring up the present condition of your ever-challenging parental imagos. So obviously trying to really address the shadow becomes a full-size task that demands real maturity from you.

Now let’s take a quick breath and step back a moment and remember that we are talking about ego consciousness trying to create a new more integrating relationship with the inferiorities that make up the shadow, from the personal to the collective and archetypal levels. This is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality. This calls for moral courage on the part of the individual. It involves extended painstaking work that is necessary for self-knowledge of the sort that our world is so sorely in need of. Please recall that I said in my previous talk on the shadow that the shadow is not made up only of inferior or negative qualities and later we can talk about some of the positive qualities that exist in the dark side of the human totality, but we must first address these inferior and negative qualities that history has proven to pose a real danger to the human race. Now we know these inferiorities that constitute the shadow have an emotional nature, they will always break into consciousness and into behavior in an emotional form that can degenerate to a hysterical level, they can range from relatively small-scale emotions that cause an otherwise normal person to behave in erratic and unexpected ways, all the way to the physically expressed hysteria that can often be seen in the old archive films of Hitler addressing the German masses in which he looks like what Jung called “ a hysterical scarecrow.” Or shadow emotion can take that horrible icy form as could be seen in Stalin. But the shadow is always emotional and always ‘primitive’ regardless of how ‘intelligent’ the ego consciousness may be. These affects from the shadow break through the defenses of ego-personality where its adaptations are weakest, where some inferiority is already manifest and they greatly diminish an already narrow capacity for moral judgment. This applies to all of us and is manifested in all of us to some degree. With a genuine moral effort involving some of the possible experiences I have already talked about, some shadow material can be made visible and conscious through examination of the contents of the personal unconscious, but, and we are moving to a deeper level here, some of the content of the shadow becomes almost impossible to draw into consciousness because it exists in the form of projections which the ego consciousness simply refuses to recognize as such. The shadow content appears to ego consciousness to be literally in the other person. Because the projection comes from the unconscious it has a completely ‘other’ appearance to the ego and this ego simply will not believe that it is seeing in the other person a quality of its own. If there is enough projection going on then the real outer world will become lost behind a veil of projections and the ego only sees in the outer world its own unknown shadow face. Its denial of the shadow takes the form of attacking the other person. One of the things that makes this so dangerous is that the person or people being projected upon may well also be projecting their own shadow and in this tangle of shadows it becomes almost impossible to sort out what is real and what isn’t. The only practical solution then is for everyone to step back into serious private self-examination which is of course exactly what so very few are really willing to do. And then if the shadow takes over, if it dominates the ego, then the shadow, which always appears in personification in dreams or fantasies as the same sex as the ego-personality, itself becomes dominated by or severely threatened by the opposite sex anima in a man and animus in a woman. Deep unconscious shadow-anima or shadow-animus mixtures are dangerous and hell to deal with because they present the possibility not only of crippling pathological development in the personality but also the possibility of that capacity for real evil in the human totality breaking out into actual behavior. Now before I go deeper into this I want to go back a moment and look at the troubling question of wholeness as it touches on the question of evil more deeply, as I said earlier that I would.

We are looking for wholeness, but what is wholeness? Jung’s idea of wholeness is what he called ‘completeness’ as opposed to ‘perfection’. The figure of Christ, the symbol of western man’s vision of wholeness, is, Jung says, a sort of perfection in a genuine ethical sense that lies at the root of our cultural desire for salvation, but this figure is not complete, it does not contain the dark side of reality but precisely separates itself from it. Jung’s idea of the archetype of the self, of human wholeness, is ‘complete’, but it is not perfect. It is a paradox of light and dark as unity. According to Jung, the self , the human totality, has a dark side, but this darkness isn’t just the so-called and misidentified ‘darkness’ of materiality or ‘earth’, or of femininity, this darkness is the genuine darkness of evil that breaks out in human atrocities whose roots go deeper than we can see. Let me read some quotes from Jung’s AION (pars. 76, 97-98). So he is saying that Christianity divides this totality into irreconcilable halves that will be eternally separated by God at the Last Judgment resulting in a metaphysical dualism, but empirical psychology says that these halves form in reality a paradoxical unity. Now there is something very important here that needs to be seen clearly. Please try to understand exactly what I am saying. Jung is saying that the totality of the self includes real evil that cannot be merely wished away or pushed off into some other reality. Now Jung’s work went a long way toward correcting both the unconscious and conscious misidentifying of this evil with materiality and femininity and certain other things. We have come some distance in our culture in correcting that lie, but even though we see this for the lie it was and is, that does not eliminate evil, it merely shows us that the source of evil was misidentified by certain people and probably remains misidentified by everyone. It showed us precisely that we do not know what the source of evil is but that it nonetheless exists at the roots of our being. The point is that we have reached a crossroads where we have to adopt a new religious attitude that has no real precedents in history. We have to accept the paradoxical nature of our totality, but not in a way that simply allows the indiscriminant free play of both sides of our totality because that would only lead to madness. On the other hand we know from history that putting too much control into the hands of either side also has undesirable results. So we need a new conscious attitude. I would describe this attitude in this way. All of us humans are in this soup together, not in the sense that we have the same patterns in unfolding or the same way of seeing things, but in the sense that we have the same basic make-up however differently its facets may be emphasized from individual to individual, from group to group. But we have the conscious capacity to step back from those emphasized facets and see that as totalities we are the same and that to be against each other is absurd. To be against each other is to refuse to address ourselves as totalities. To address ourselves as totalities is to see that we are all confronted with the same challenge. That challenge is this: We are personally and collectively a totality that is paradoxical and includes a capacity for love in our relationship with each other and a capacity for evil in that relationship. We have, up to this point in our history on earth, not found a means of resolving this essential human paradox in a meaningful way. We have instead divided into countless opposing groups who tend to divide the human totality by emphasizing certain facets of it at the expense of others and believing in gods and goddesses who support and give assumed eternal truth-value to those preferred facets. But we see now that this division in humanity can only finally lead to catastrophe. So we have come together in the consciousness of our common totality and together we face this problem of not knowing how to meaningfully resolve our paradoxical nature. We see that the religious challenge before us is to give up our previous religious prejudices arising from our too limited perspectives and to consciously descend into the roots of our paradoxical totality to learn as much as we can about the source of our conflicting capacities. We know that anything we discover along the way, however useful, should not be mistaken for absolute knowledge because absolute knowledge can only be that knowledge that literally resolves our paradox. That is our goal and that is our new unprecedented collective and personal spiritual work. We treasure any contribution made by anyone in any way toward our desire for deeper self-knowledge.

That is my statement for now about the larger picture. But to return to the question of addressing the personal shadow, let me conclude with these thoughts. I said I would come back to that point where the ego and the shadow and the anima and animus intersect. I said that the ego cannot simply give in to the shadow, it must be discriminating, but it must also be open to change in itself. That means that the male ego in integrating the shadow must combine with its natural tendency toward an assertive logos understanding a receptive eros understanding. It must remember that this is an integrating relating between ego and shadow and part of the male ego’s task here is to give a place of asylum to the shadow as well as confront it with discrimination. Part of the reason why the shadow has a power-drive is because of its vulnerable inferiority. As well as being threatening, the shadow is also vulnerable and threatened by the fact of its inferiority and the only way it can find security in this inferiority is to reach for power. The problem is that if it attains power it uses that power in an inferior and dangerous way. The shadow needs to be given space where its energy can assert itself in a way that is not a form of power over others which is what it wants. So the shadow needs to be given asylum as well as being confronted with discriminating judgment. When the male ego takes this approach of putting logos and eros together in the harness, this harness of opposites, then he not only greatly diminishes the likelihood of simply antagonizing or being overcome by the shadow, but he also prepares the ground for developing a proper relationship with his anima, the female aspect of his own greater personality, because by opening his own eros capacity in dealing with the shadow he is already allowing his own femininity to participate in his own newly developing identity. And the process of relating to the shadow will run directly into being confronted by the anima. And if the male ego does not develop this movement toward wholeness in dealing with the shadow and the anima, then he will have none of the required depth or strength to meaningfully deal with the dark side on an archetypal level which is the challenge that will inevitably confront him at some point. If the male ego fails to open to eros in its relations with the shadow, then the male shadow will get the upper hand on the male ego and then that male shadow will be blended with and dominated by the female anima in a hostile, negative form. The naturally assertive male ego lying down there at the bottom of that pile of shadow and negative anima may, instead of becoming a crippled milk-sop, go into revolt and feel a ferocious disdain for and fear of and paradoxical and tormenting longing for deep femininity. If this complex of shadow-dominated ego and negative anima makes contact with the archetypal level then what will break out is the patriarchal fanaticism that sees femininity as the root of evil and sees a perfect justification oppressing ordinary women and burning witches.

Now let’s look at this from the perspective of the female ego and reverse everything and see that the female ego, in dealing with its female shadow, must combine with its natural tendency toward eros understanding a discriminating logos understanding. The female ego must also utilize the harness of opposites in relating to the female shadow, it must open itself to logos understanding in its relations with the shadow in order to prepare a ground for relating to the animus, the male aspect of its own greater personality. Without this movement toward wholeness, the female ego will not have the depth and strength needed to meaningfully deal with the evil in dark side on an archetypal level which is the challenge that will inevitably confront her at some point. The failure to do this, to open to logos discrimination in dealing with the shadow, and to deal with it only through eros leads to a denial of the existence of evil in the dark side. It sees the dark side as being merely misunderstood and this gives the female shadow the upper hand in its relations with the female ego rather than forming a proper integration and this failure to open to the male aspect, to utilize the harness of opposites, leads in turn to the failure of bringing the animus into proper relationship with female consciousness. The result of this is that the dominant female shadow then is blended with and itself dominated by the unconscious animus. At that point the naturally assertive, aggressive nature of the animus colored by shadow may enter into the current of shadow that reaches all the way to the archetypal level. If this complex of female shadow dominated by male animus enters into and breaks out on an archetypal level then you have the evil of something like the male god Dionysius leading the female maenads in a frenzy of slaughter and dismemberment. So a focus on wholeness is required from the beginning, in the first steps of relating to the personal shadow in order to diminish the likelihood of undesirable results. And remember that even if one succeeds in relating to the shadow and the anima or animus in a healthy way, we still don’t even know what it means to relate properly to the archetypal dark side where the roots of evil lie. To conclude I would like to say that I know all this may sound uninviting, but we must keep in mind the danger of letting it all fade away into the unconscious. I said that this work as a clearly laid out conscious goal is unprecedented and that is true, but we do have from the past one clear glimpse of our goal which arose in the early history of European consciousness but was never understood and integrated. I am talking about the figure of Merlin in the Arthurian legend. Merlin was the only clearly formulated complete blend of darkness and light in one figure in our cultural history. The alchemical figure of Mercurius is also such a blend, but Mercurius has no clear outline but is rather constantly changing so that it is very difficult to find a focal point in relating to that figure. But Merlin is quite clearly formulated. Merlin was fathered by the Devil on a holy virgin. He is Christ and Anti-Christ in one. He was a real breakthrough of truth into consciousness, but he was not made proper use of and he slipped back into the unconscious. The story goes that Merlin came under the spell of the Lady of the Lake and was trapped in a dark cave where he would remain lost forever with only his voice, his cries coming from the grave still remaining. The story is very strange because it seems incredible that this female figure could have such power over the superhuman Merlin. But what it means is that when Merlin became a conscious figure, a figure in the collective consciousness, instead of being integrated by consciousness the figure dissolved into the unconscious again as symbolized by the Lady of the Lake. Now only his cries are perceivable by us. I hope that we listen to his voice and bring him back into consciousness, not as a myth but as our own willingness to enter the work I have been talking about.