Analogismoi Two: Heroes, Dragons and Psychologists.

“Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…the treasure hard to attain”
Carl Jung Symbols of Transformation 1912

 

For a Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dedicated quite a bit of effort on the discussion and analysis of dragons. In his books Symbols of Transformation 1912, Psychology and Alchemy 1944 and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 1959, Jung goes to great lengths to try and understand dragons. Let’s get back to this in a bit.

Human beings are deeply patterned biologically, psychologically and socially and those patterns are reflective of one another. These patterns are acted out embodied knowledge which replicates itself and evolves with the circumstances of the human.

Take, for example, our earliest ancestors. The mastery of fire was a landmark moment for human beings. Fire’s importance cannot be overstated. However, fire is not merely a font of helpfulness. Fire can be man’s best friend or worst enemy. That is a pattern which repeats itself constantly throughout history.

The most ancient binary pattern for humans is that of safety/danger (you can think of this also as order/chaos, known/unknown). Picture your ancient ancestor. For him there was a space of relative safety. That safe spot was close to a safely maintained fire used for heat, light and cooking and where the people of his family or tribe gathered around.

The environmental problem posed was something like this — away from the safety of the fire, out in the darkness, there was danger. Predator animals, other tribes and unknown environmental issues meant venturing out into the unknown could very likely mean death. However, out there in the dark where all the danger lies is also where all the things of value hide. Men would leave the safety of the fire and venture into the danger of the dark and, should they be skilled and lucky enough, return to the fire with food or information (one special feature of humans being that food is important, but the knowledge of where to find the food is more important yet. In this sense, knowledge is a meta food…something we will talk about more with regard to the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge).

The way Darwinian evolution works is that there is environmental and sexual selection. Nature is, for the Darwinian, that which selects. The human being is a complex system which has spent a vast span of time adapting to its environment (the bifurcated brain itself is just a manifest answer to the biological reality of chaos and order, but more on that later). Further, there is sexual selection. One of the reasons for the human-chimpanzee split had to do with human females being selective breeders while their chimp counterparts are not. For all the complaining from modern men about female hypergamy it seems lost on many people that female hypergamy is in a large part the reason for consciousness as such.

In sexual selection the men compete amongst each other to figure out who is at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the hypergamous women then peel from the top of the hierarchy. And of course this is the case. Women aren’t idiots. If the men are going to compete to rank order themselves why wouldn’t the women want to peel from the top. The top is where the winners are.

For this reason, the men who wandered away from the fire and were not killed by the environment but rather returned home with some form of wealth either in terms of food or precious objects or information were seen as the best men by the other men and as such received the best chances at sexual reproduction.

Like fire itself, the unknown has the two fold meaning of being the place of great wealth and the place of great danger. The thing about known space is that it is known. There is nothing new there. There is no opportunity to grow or learn or discover in known space. For all intents and purposes, even though it is safe, known space is irrelevant as its value to us has already been harvested.  Like the areas of danger, like the right hemisphere of the brain, like fire, the unknown is where it is most terrifying and, simultaneously, most valuable.

The question is: If this binary relationship of known/unknown, safety/danger, order/chaos, right hemisphere/left hemisphere is the most ancient and embedded pattern in humans where is it that we see it represented? The answer is — everywhere.

Now we come back to Jung and his dragons — and in next week’s post on the Enuma Elis we will really get into why dragons are so important for humans.

This story of the value laden dangerous unknown is ubiquitous in human history. Take, for example, the story of

St. George. St. George, a legendary Christian solider, in Golden Legends, goes to a town which is being terrorized by a dragon. The dragon demands human sacrifices and is given the King’s daughter. St. George vows to slay the dragon and so he does, saving the princess and saving the city, killing the beast and converting the town to Christianity.

You might wonder, did this happen? I would suggest that people who get stuck on whether or not this happened have absolutely missed the point in the most shallow way possible.

The dragon hordes the princess, the virgin, the treasure and the hero ventures into the lair of the dragon, slays the beast, restores justice, saves the city, saves the virgin, attains the treasure….this really happens constantly, for everyone, all the time. It is Smaug hoarding the ancestral treasure of the dwarves in The Hobbit. It is Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke has a confrontation with his dark side in the Dagobah cave, it is Sleeping Beauty where Prince Phillip slays Maleficent in dragon form to save Aurora. It is Beowulf where Beowulf’s battle with a dragon costs him his life, but saves his people. It is Harry Potter both in his confrontation with the basilisk (Chamber of Secrets) and Harry’s confrontation with the Hungarian Horntail Dragon in the Triwizard tournament — a battle with his own insecurity, fear and vulnerability making a step towards mastering his inner conflicts.

For as long as people have been telling stories (see next week’s Main Project entry dealing with the Enuma Elis) there have been monstrous (often fire breathing) dragons which are the gatekeepers to the greatest treasures.

Jung picks up on this and considered the dragon as a universal symbol found across cultures representing the dual

nature of the psyche — destructive and transformative. In the Hero’s Journey, Jung points to dragons as frequent adversaries that the hero must face.

For Jung, the hero’s journey was largely an internal psychological journey of the incorporation of ones own shadow to transform the self. When the dragon outside the city walls is slain we find new dragons inside the city walls. When those dragons are slain we find the dragons in our home. When we slay those dragons, we find that there is still a dragon inside us, still a serpent inside paradise.

That it is the platform dating all the way back to our ancient ancestors and the search for the sustenance of life in the place most fraught with danger is the reason it keeps appearing. The emergent morality we saw in rats with regard to not sacrificing the future for the present is here as well as we are constantly searching for the meta-food (mana, Christ) that will not feed us now, but sustain us eternally.

One of the main things people have been up to these last several hundred thousand years has been telling each other stories reflective of the patterned mode of being through which we exist.

So what is a dragon. Well, a dragon is a chimera (like the cherubim guarding Eden after the fall, but more on that to come). When we think we do so at various levels of resolution and various levels of analysis. For instance, when young child sees a dog the level of analysis is “dog.” It is not “four legged mammal” and it is not “collection of living atoms” and it is not “Shepherd” and it is not “Molly.” It is dog. Low resolution. Short guttural word. Nearly instantaneous recognition. (cf., Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky)

This is the baseline level of analysis. Any less detail and it would become meaningless and more detail needs to be learned over time. In the same way, early man did not see a venomous cobra. That isn’t the way the mind works. Natural Selection, environmental evolution, required response systems to predators that were much faster than that. You do not see an animal, analyze it and then say “oh predator I better get away.” You see “HOLY SHIT” and you scramble. Our ability to do this (and lack of ability not to…feel free to look into Charles Darwin’s trips to the British Museum where they had a cobra on display and his inability to train away his flinch reflex) is the reason our ancestors survived. We see predator in the lowest possible resolution so it takes the least possible amount of time for us to take an evasive action.

J.J. Gibson, in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception 1979, explains how we do not see a cliff. That is too high resolution for human’s to have survived. The time it takes to process a cliff and all the variable scenarios it presents would make self preservation impossible. What we see first when we see a cliff is a “falling off place” and as such our body instinctively and instantaneously knows, whatever this thing is it is the kind of thing I could fall off of.

The dragon is a chimera which contains all of the predators that killed our ancestors. It is snake like. It is predatory cat like. It is predatory bird like. It breathes fire. Are dragons real? Well, is there a category which is an amalgam of all things which are predatory and which human beings react to so quickly it cannot be rationally processed first? And the answer is not just yes but necessarily yes because without it we would not have survived as a species. So yes, dragons are real. Dragon is the category of all predation of mankind. The fact that the psychology of man should mimic his environmental predicament is no surprise at all. As I mentioned earlier, for the Darwinian nature is that which selects and as such the evolved human is, in large part, an answer to a natural environmental state.

The brain is bifurcated into a right hemisphere which projects near hallucinatory, dream like chaotic knowledge and the left hemisphere then encapsulates that knowledge in a neural net and makes it sensible and articulate. There is no reason to think that the human brain did not evolve this way to reflect a similar natural phenomenon whereby outside that which is known is both danger and value and that it needs to be confronted, processed and made articulate. This is the story of Moses on Sinai.

As we move on to the earliest human myths we will see this mode of being taking on ever more significant roles. While this is intensely complicated in some ways, in other ways it is quite simple to understand. Very early on in the evolutionary process people from all over the world had some basic questions about life. One of, if not the earliest, is what the hell we are going to do in our short, painful, terrifying and often torturous time on this planet. The answer that sprouts up in the Ancient Near East (Babylon and Mesopotamia and later on the Hebrews) is simple: we heroically and voluntarily confront the terror of the vicissitudes of life, encapsulating them with attention and articulation until the chaotic becomes habitable, the unknown is folded into the known and the acted out embodied mode of being becomes articulated.

This story, which originates environmentally and biologically, evolves into the cornerstone of the western world. The dramatically different answer given in the east explains a lot of the differences, but we will have an entire article on that in the future. What is important to note here is that we did not fall out of the trees, naked, covered in lice, starving and half insane with a full blown cosmology of transcendent ethical value and meaning which is a balm for the sufferings of man environmentally, socially, psychologically and spiritually. It took a little time and the fact that we have come this far means, I think, its time to cut humans a little slack

Instead what happened was we told each other stories about a proper mode of being which would make life meaningful until those stories emerged, refined by vast swaths of time, as complex philosophical notions.