Category: Ideas

From an archetypal point of view, there is another major correspondence between the two films. Both Star Wars (the first three movies) and The Hidden Fortress are what I call Orphan Stories. They are stories featuring a hero who goes through the archetypal progression from the Orphan to the Adult. In the broadest terms, we cease to be Orphans and become Adults when we find a place in society and establish ourselves in four main areas. There is our economic identity, our political identity, our religious identity and our sexual identity. All four of these are brought together in marriage and so marriage is a useful shorthand for the transition to adulthood.

Stories about elites are usually more dramatic since they involve not just a personal but a societal element. That’s why there’s so many movies about kings, queens, wizards and warriors. Both Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress are Orphan Stories featuring characters who are destined to become the elite of their society. But here we see an important difference. George Lucas made Princess Leia not the main character of his movie. Rather, Star Wars is the Orphan Story of Luke Skywalker. The Hidden Fortress, on the other hand, is the Orphan Story of Princess Yuki. I’ve been writing a lot about Orphan Stories over the last couple of years and I think The Hidden Fortress is the first one I’ve written about which features a female protagonist.

The Hidden Fortress is sometimes considered one of Kurosawa’s more lightweight movies. I find that very strange because it is both an Orphan Story and a political treatise masquerading as an action/adventure movie. The political aspects of the story are worth a post in themselves and we’ll be looking at those next week. In this post, we’ll analyse the film as the Orphan Story of princess Yuki.

There’s a technical aspect of storytelling that we need to introduce at this point. Almost all blockbuster films and best-selling novels have what is called a B-story. As the name suggests, the B-story is a second, relatively independent story within the main story. Usually, it will feature a character who is not the hero.

In The Hidden Fortress, it is Princess Yuki’s need to become a queen which technically forms the B-story of the film. That B-story is an Orphan Story because it is about the journey princess Yuki must take to attain adulthood both in the societal sense but, more importantly, in the personal, psychological sense.

They are sentenced to hard labour as punishment but manage to escape whereupon they accidentally stumble across the area where general Rokurota is storing the gold bars which will need to be transported with the princess to rebuild the Akizuki clan later on. Initially planning to kill the two fools so they don’t steal the gold, Rokurota instead enlists their help with the journey.

With this, we have the three main building blocks of society as traditionally conceived. The princess is the Ruler, Rokurota is the Warrior and the two fools are the peasantry. Later, a third female peasant will be added to the group on their journey. She is a member of the Akizuki clan that has fallen on hard times due to the war. It‘s for this reason that the main story can be analysed for its implied political meaning, which we’ll do in next week’s post.

We know from practically every fairy tale princess that we can expect a Jungian animus figure to come to her rescue. Since the Orphan Story of princess Yuki is not about marriage but about her initiation into the role of queen, the animus figure is not filled by a suitor but by the aforementioned general, Rokurota. It is he who will safely guide the princess from her mountain hideaway and induct her into “the real world”. More symbolically, he represents the successful archetypal transition to Adult with an implied animus transcendence that comes with a female hero.

One of the key themes of the Orphan Story is that the Orphan must leave its parents and venture into the world. Since the family home is a place of love and safety and the wider world is a place of danger and risk, the natural temptation is for the child to stay at home and avoid the risk. In the case of young women, the risk from the wider world is even higher, especially away from big cities where running across a stranger in the forest can lead to big trouble (this scenario lies at the heart of one of Kurosawa’s other classic movies we’ll be looking at in a later post, Rashomon).

What we see in The Hidden Fortress is the virtuous mid-point between these two extremes and therefore the healthy response that most parents manage to get right. Princess Yuki is not thrown out into the world willy-nilly, she has the great general Rokurota to guide her. Nevertheless, the break with the parents is traumatic and it is a core feature of the Orphan Story that the hero must learn to process the grief that comes from that break. In less dramatic fashion, it’s a process we all go through in our own lives.

Because the story of princess Yuki is an Orphan Story featuring a female hero, Rokurota symbolically represents her Jungian animus or Soul. Among other things, he is her sense of right and wrong, her self-confidence and her willpower. It is noteworthy in this respect that Rokurota does not win by violence or military strength throughout the course of the movie. He can’t do this even if he wanted to because he is unarmed and massively out-gunned by the numerous forces of the enemy. Instead, he wins by cleverness and artful deceit. One way to watch the movie is to put princess Yuki in Rokurota’s place. Since victory does not rely on physical strength, it’s something princess Yuki could have done herself. That is part of her initiation. She is the Orphan learning from Rokurota how to do it.

What Rokurota models throughout the movie is the manner in which princess Yuki needs to rule once she becomes queen i.e. using strength and violence only as a last resort. In this way, we can also think of Rokurota as the Elder to the princess since it is an almost universal trope of Orphan Stories that the Elder will lead the Orphan to maturity. It is noteworthy in this respect that the Elder is masculine even for Orphan heroes who are male. In gnostic terms, this is because the masculine principle is the outgoing, extroverted force while the feminine is receptive. These are just two sides of the same coin and both men and women need to come to terms with each. But it is the masculine which is the “guide” and therefore forms the natural representation of the Elder.

What The Hidden Fortress shows, however, is that facing and overcoming danger is exactly what the Orphan needs since the only alternative is to remain dissociated from reality in your mountain hideaway. Princess Yuki already has most of the qualities she needs to be a queen at the beginning of the film. She is smart, she has conviction, she understands the motives of others and she understands what she needs to do to fulfil her mission. She has all of the “higher” qualities. What she doesn’t have is experience of the “lower” aspects of the world. Her journey is therefore to come down from her ivory tower to experience the real world.

This is symbolised in the movie by the fact that she must wear the disguise of a mute peasant girl to hide her identity in the journey through enemy territory. Rokurota also takes on the costume of a peasant and, of course, they are travelling with two actual peasants in the form of the two village idiots who have become their travelling companions. The princess must learn how the real world works. She sees the greed and betrayal of the two idiots, the mistreatment of the Akizuki peasant woman who has been sold into prostitution and the incompetence of the enemy soldiers.

The apotheosis of this comes in a dramatic scene towards the end of the film featuring a peasant wood-burning festival. This captures, albeit in highly symbolic form, another main theme from the Orphan Story which is the confrontation with death. Especially in Hollywood, this is almost always represented as a direct threat. For example, Luke Skywalker faces death in the battle with Vader and Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi while Neo faces death in the battle with Agent Smith at the end of The Matrix.

In the context of The Hidden Fortress, the confrontation with death has a political dimension since princess Yuki must learn that her mission is not primarily about herself but about the continuation of the Akizuki clan in general. But that is also the fulfilment of the Orphan Story. To graduate to the Adult archetype requires the transcendence of the narcissism of adolescence. To step into adulthood is to fulfil obligations to society. The confrontation with death is perhaps a necessary prelude to that since we learn that we are only passing through this world and our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to try and leave things better than we found them. To do that, we must do what princess Yuki does, come down from our hidden fortress (the Intellect) and be prepared to get our hands dirty in the muck and messiness of the real world.

The historian, Arnold Toynbee, noted that the Universal State, the empire which politically unifies all the contending nations in the final phase of a civilisation, may bring peace and stability but it also produces monstrosities. We are familiar with some of the monstrosities the Roman Empire produced in the form of the mad Caesars Nero, Caligula, Commodus and Maximinus Thrax. Other monstrosities from Rome included the incredibly cruel and brutal punishments handed out to political opponents. Falling on your own sword was certainly a wise move if you happened to be a nobleman watching a contingent of soldiers coming to steal the gold from your estate.

We all live under the Universal State of the Faustian civilisation which is being run out of Washington D.C. and so it’s not that much of a surprise to see the arrival of various monstrosities in our time. The GFC and the corona debacle have to rate right up there with the best of the bunch. The current enormous influx of illegal immigrants into the US is perhaps the latest example in terms of the sheer scale of the operation and also the baffling politics of the matter. The polls that I’ve seen indicate that there is large majority support from the voters of both major parties to put an end to it and you would think that a democracy could at least pretend to care about the wishes of the voters. Instead, the two main parties are apparently stitching up a bill that would essentially legalise the whole business.

In order to understand what’s going on you have to first understand that the US is running an empire but it’s a very unusual kind of empire. Some historians have called it an Informal Empire. Other phrases that work would be an Occult Empire, an Esoteric Empire or an Unconscious Empire. I’ve preferred to use the latter term since another baffling aspect of the whole business is that a majority of Americans are not even aware that their government is running an empire even while the government blatantly pursues the interests of the empire over the will of the people. That is, of course, exactly what is behind the border shenanigans. It’s about the interests of the empire.

The advent of paper currencies tied to gold did much to alleviate this problem. In the 19^th century, the British Pound was probably the main currency for trade but there were plenty of other currencies in circulation and most countries would have traded in many different currencies. For the most part, trade continued to grow and it did benefit the nations who engaged in it. The reason is because the currency earned from trade could be used domestically for investment and consumption. Australia is a good example. We were “built on the sheep’s back”. We traded wool and used the money to invest domestically.

The other nice thing about that system was that it was self-correcting. If the convertibility of a currency into gold was called into question, for example if there were too many Pounds circulating relative gold holdings, traders moved away from that currency and drove down demand. Moreover, the Bank of England and other banks had to ensure confidence in the currency was maintained which they did by adjusting interest rates to bring things back to balance.

It was the absence of this balancing that Keynes saw as the problem with the agreements made at Bretton Woods and which would become even more pronounced with the closing of the gold window in 1971.

Let’s take an example. Australia sells wool to Britain in the 19^th century. Somebody makes a profit. What are they going to do with it? Chances are, they will either spend or invest it locally since foreign investment is difficult and comes with its own costs. The profits from trade benefitted the nation.

Let’s take a similar situation today but in a developing country. You sell something to the international market and you make a profit. What are you going to do with the money? You could invest it in your own country. But, now, there are a variety of financial instruments available to you in the US and other western nations that will give you a guaranteed return. So, you’ll take those guaranteed returns over the more risky investment in your own country. What this means is that the profits from trade are no longer invested locally but go off overseas looking for a better and lower risk return.

This leads to the situation that Keynes predicted where there are now permanent imbalances in the system. The US deficit of $34 trillion dollars is the surest evidence for that. In addition, there are nations who have based their economy on permanent trade surpluses. Japan and Germany are two prime examples. Brazil and China have jumped on board in the last couple of decades.

There are a number of side effects of this imbalanced system. Firstly, domestic demand in the nations that run surpluses is permanently curtailed. I have some personal experience of this since about five years ago I was offered a job in Germany. They asked me for my salary expectations and I told them what I was currently earning here in Australia. It was about 1/3^rd more than the equivalent job in Germany. Now, the absolute cost of living in Germany is lower and so it may be that my standard of living in Germany would have been similar to what I have in Australia. But, in absolute terms, I would have taken a pay cut. That’s the problem for Germans, Japanese and especially for Chinese.

The problem for Americans and other western countries is that by allowing other nations to run trade surpluses they put their own manufacturers out of business and that means the loss of working class jobs, something which has now become a major political issue. Perhaps more important is the fact that the system massively increases the power of bankers and billionaires vis a vis the rest of society. Those bankers and billionaires then buy off the political class thereby permanently tilting the table in their favour. This also explains all the various nonsensical and fake “social movements” of the past decade or more. They are all funded by monied interests to distract the attention of the public. (In fairness, some of it is just the fever dreams of billionaires with too much time and money on their hands).

There’s another side effect, though, and this brings us back to the border crisis. Why are there so many people from all around the world clamouring to get into the United States and Europe? The answer is yet again related to the systemic imbalances that the post-war system creates. We are told that developing nations have corruption problems and that is certainly true. But a big part of that corruption stems from the fact that the elites in those nations are incentivised to take their capital and invest it not in their own country but in the financial instruments provided by the United States and other western nations.

Thus, developing nations not only suffer the demand suppression, they also no longer invest in productive enterprises at home. The money gets sucked out of the local economy creating the exact conditions in which corruption takes over as locals are left to try and screw whatever they can get out of the system. Then, the investment money which does flow comes not from locals but from overseas banks serving their own interests and not those of the local population.

Meanwhile, the elites from those countries jet off on overseas holidays, keep permanent apartments in the fashionable districts of western cities, send their kids to Harvard and Yale and generally live it up at the expense of their countrymen.

This is all related to a larger problem in the post war years where the West actively supported various dictators in the Middle East and other countries. The reason? It’s easier to do business with a dictator who will do all the dirty work to keep his own population in line. China has taken that dynamic to a whole new level with the social credit scores and other dystopian measures that are designed to keep Chinese citizens from getting any ideas about wielding economic or political power.

The result of all of this is to create an enormous number of people who see no hope living in their country and will take any chance to flee it. Apparently, there are quite a large number of Chinese among the illegal immigrants crossing the US border these days. Perhaps they are spies for the CCP. Perhaps they just want to get the hell out of China.

In the meantime, the US has also created cultural conditions internally where to do any job other than a professional office job is somehow to be seen as a failure. Alongside the gutting of the manufacturing sector, this leads to huge numbers of people dissociating from society in drug addiction, porn, computer games and all the rest. These are the people who could be doing important manual labour jobs like harvesting vegetables, working in abattoirs and all the other things that actually put food on the table. Instead, those workers need to be imported which is exactly what is behind the push to give all these illegal immigrants work visas.

There is one final side effect worth pointing out. The whole system relies on western financial markets being completely open, transparent and reliable. Foreigners are actually buying real assets in western nations, thing like real estate, agriculture, stocks, bonds etc. That is why we are now seeing massive asset bubbles. Even the US is now catching up to Canada and Australia for what is another monstrosity in the making; probably history’s greatest real estate bubble.

The reason why all this has been getting so much worse in recent decades is because the neoliberal agenda of the 80s and 90s pushed the whole dynamic into overdrive. In fairness, it seems the US discovered how far it could push things more by accident than design (although it is possible there were some smart cookies behind the scenes who knew exactly what they were doing). Thus, China has entered the system on a very similar footing to Germany and Japan. The allowance of China into the international system has been like pouring fuel on the fire. To make it work, western nations dismantled their manufacturing sectors and privatised everything that wasn’t nailed down to increase the amount of assets available to soak up foreign capital.

As for real estate, well, see for yourself.

Keynes was right. We now have permanent, asymmetric growth and permanent asymmetric growth is almost the literal definition of the word monstrosity.

But, of course, all of this is a feature and not a bug. Even if the methods have been discovered by accident, all the decisions made have been in the same direction and with the same goal in mind: to maximise the power that the United States and its proxies wield through control of the financial system.

Increasingly, that power is now being turned against the citizens of western nations. I’m sure there must be some iron rule of politics that how you run your foreign policy eventually becomes how you run your domestic politics. The elites of the western nations have become just like the elites of the foreign countries who they have championed: happy to throw their own citizens under the bus to perpetuate their own power.

A prime example of films with unexpected deeper meanings are Kurosawa’s numerous samurai films. Such films provide ample opportunity for cool camera angles and entertaining sword battles, but they are also the expression of the Warrior archetype. Each archetype has its own strengths and weaknesses. We can call the weaknesses the shadow forms of the archetype since, in a Jungian sense, they really are challenges thrown up from the Unconscious. If they didn’t come from the Unconscious, they wouldn’t be challenges.

Each archetype has characteristic challenges in the forms of temptations and traps that they risk falling into. For the Warrior, the primary shadow form is what I have called the hyper-masculine. Having accrued the skills and knowledge to use lethal force, what is to stop the Warrior from using those skills for wrong instead of right? Most stories with a Warrior hero deal with this question in one way or another.

Kurosawa holds what we might call a traditional political philosophy on the correct ordering of society. Following Plato, Aristotle, Toynbee and numerous other thinkers throughout the ages, Kurosawa sees the correct place for the Warrior class as subservient to a just and wise ruling class. It is when a just and wise ruling class is not present that the Warrior class is tempted to the shadow form of the hyper-masculine.

In the first movie, Yojimbo, Sanjuro wanders into a village that is being torn apart by two mob bosses. The two strongmen are hiring whatever criminals they can find to try and build up a force that can destroy the other. Sanjuro, as a skilled Warrior, becomes a highly prized asset whose services both strongmen try to obtain. Meanwhile, the local authorities are corrupt and taking bribes from the two mafia bosses. Sanjuro comes up with a plan to hasten the destruction of the two groups but, when his plan is foiled, he gets sucked more and more into the situation and eventually must use all his wits just to survive.

Yojimbo is considered one of Kurosawa’s most influential movies. It was the inspiration for many a western film. In fact, Sergio Leone was so inspired by it that he lost a lawsuit to Kurosawa who successfully argued that A Fistful of Dollars was a copyright violation.

In my opinion, the follow-up film, Sanjuro is far more interesting since it involves the samurai wandering into a town where there is still a just ruling class but one that is under attack. Sanjuro’s job is then to perform the archetypal mission of the Warrior by holding the bad guys to account and restoring justice and wisdom to its proper place.

This forms the opening scene of the movie. A group of naïve young aristocrats, one of whom is the nephew of the clan leader, has discovered a fraud committed in the court and written a petition to the leader to address it. The leader tells them he will handle the situation himself. Unsatisfied with this response, they go to the superintendent. Unbeknownst to them, the superintendent is the crooked one and a sequence of events unfolds where the samurai saves the group from the superintendent’s men and then must try to rescue the clan leader who has now been framed for the crime by the superintendent himself. (Framing your opponent for the crime you committed is a story as old as politics.)

In archetypal terms, the group of young aristocrats are the Orphans trying to make their way in the world. They are overenthusiastic and naïve. The uncle, the leader of the clan, may want to handle the corruption quietly, but in doing so he provides no guidance or learning opportunity for the Orphans. He fails to become their Elder. Accordingly, they go and do something silly by alerting the very man who is behind the corruption who then tries to kill them.

Sanjuro happens to overhear their conversation. As an experienced man of the world, he instantly weighs up the matter and concludes that the superintendent is the corrupt one. Since Sanjuro has just arrived in town and owes no allegiance to the young aristocrats, he has no compunction talking to them and treating them like the fools that they are. For their part, they neither understand his ways nor trust him, despite the fact that he repeatedly saves their lives.

In this way, the movie Sanjuro is a demonstration of the archetypal breakdown of the Orphan – Elder relationship. It’s not enough to have just and noble leaders. That can work as long as those leaders are in place. But what happens when they are gone? A society must train the next generation of leaders. Therefore, somebody has to become an Elder to that next generation of Orphans and pass on the knowledge and skills required to continue the culture. That is the problem in the clan. The clan leader is failing to fulfill his role as Elder and has allowed the young aristocrats, the archetypal Orphans, to blunder into trouble.

Of course, the clan itself is under attack from the shadow form of the Warrior. The superintendent represents the Warrior class of the clan but he is the one behind the corruption. It takes the noble Warrior, Sanjuro, to restore the clan to stability by riding into town and saving the aristocrats from their own naivete.

Thus, Sanjuro is partly the story of the coming-of-age of the young aristocrats. They are going to have to learn about the real dangers of holding political power where naivete and innocence can get you killed. If that’s true, it makes Sanjuro their Elder.

Remembering the archetypal table I introduced last year:-

	Physical	Exoteric	Esoteric
Child	Pre-puberty	N/A	Imagination
Orphan	Puberty	Student, apprentice	Intellect
Adult	Maturity	Economic, political, sexual maturity	Will
Elder	Old Age (menopause)	Mentor, Elder, (Retired)	Soul

The Warrior archetype is included in the generic Adult archetype alongside the two other primary archetypes of Ruler and the Sage (priest/scientist/wizard). Sanjuro begins the movie as the Warrior and is thrown together with a group of Orphans. His mission is to teach them the ways of the world. In order to do that, he must transcend to the next level in the table. He must become an Elder and confront his Soul.

What does Soul mean in this context? It means doing what is right for its own sake. In the earlier film, Yojimbo, Sanjuro’s mission was the standard Warrior’s mission. He had to kill the bad guys. That is the Warrior’s archetypal job. What is left ambiguous in the first movie is whether Sanjuro is doing what is right. Is it right to hasten the destruction of a town that is doomed to destroy itself anyway? Of course, the movie finds a way to make it clear that Sanjuro is doing what is right but it’s not so naïve to present this as an unalloyed victory.

This comes back to the eternal problem faced by the Warrior. How can you know that the use of lethal force is the best course of action? The answer is you can’t because the second and third order effects of lethal force can never be predicted in advance. The Warrior must act with imperfect information. Once the battle is over and the second and third order effects are known, it’s always possible to make the argument that the use of lethal force wasn’t worth it. Moral ambiguity is a problem that the Warrior must deal with. The temptation is to discard morality altogether, but that way leads to the shadow side of the Warrior.

Since Warriors need to get paid like anybody else, there is the added temptation to treat the work like a job. That’s exactly what we see at the beginning of Sanjuro. The aristocrats thank the samurai for his help by offering payment. Sanjuro takes that payment and is about to walk away when he realises that the superintendent is going to gobble up the young fools unless he stays and helps them. Thus, Sanjuro’s decision at the very start of the movie is to do what is right even though it is going to involve significant personal risk for little to no personal gain. That’s his first step towards the Elder archetype and the Soul.

The film ends with an interesting archetypal observation which Kurosawa makes in several of his other films. Only the Warrior can appreciate the challenges faced by other Warriors, including and especially the temptations of the shadow forms of the archetype. Sanjuro and Muroto may be enemies by circumstance, but they are friends to the extent that both understand what it means to be a Warrior when nobody around them, especially the foolish young aristocrats, has any idea. The final scene captures both Sanjuro’s transcendence and Muroto’s downfall. Muroto is the Warrior who cannot sheath his sword. He succumbs to the shadow form of the archetype: the hyper-masculine. Sanjuro learns that the best sword is kept in its sheath.

One of the questions I’ve been puzzling through recently is the state of rites of passage in modern Western society. Nominally speaking, we seem to have very few rites of passage and this also seems to be tied in with the absence of the Elder archetype in our culture since, from an anthropological point of view, it is the Elder who conducts rites of passage. No rites of passage, no Elders. Makes sense. But is it actually true?

There are three phases to a rite of passage: Separation – Transition – Incorporation. In the first phase, we separate from the normal world that we live in day-to-day. We then enter a new state that is different from that world. That’s the Transition phase. The Incorporation phase involves navigating back to the everyday world with some new thing or property that we have incorporated or made part of ourselves.

In addition to van Gennep’s original concept, I would add a few points. Firstly, a rite of passage is a linkage between the individual and society. We can think of it as a way for society to initiate individuals into a culture. Since most rites of passage are designed to navigate through a dangerous period of time, it is also a way to lend assistance to the individual. For example, almost every society has elaborate rites of passage around pregnancy and pregnancy has, for most of history, been very dangerous for both woman and child. Thus, we can also think of the rites of passage a way to assist the initiate through a dangerous period.

The Elder who conducts the rite of passage is always a representative of an institution of society. Traditionally speaking, there are three classes of Elders: the political Elders, the religious Elders and the warrior Elders. Here is another key point. The Elders themselves are “sacred” since they have more power than the other members of society. Accordingly, there are usually elaborate rites dealing with the interaction between Elders and general members of society. These are there for the “protection” of both parties since Elders are a threat due to their power and their power puts them at risk from the rest of the public. It’s also for this reason that Elders are located in a “sacred” placed that is separate from the general run of society.

From this lightning overview alone we can see why rites of passage are foreign to us in the modern West since with our extreme secular and materialist outlook this all sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless, we do have our rites of passage and our Elders. Let’s take one example: a job interview.

Rites of passage almost always mark the Separation from the everyday with special clothing. This is true of a job interview since most people will show up in a suit or similar formal outfit. Assuming you actually want the job, you’ll probably make sure you get a good night’s sleep the night before so that you perform at your best in the interview. Before the interview itself, you might take a shower and pay extra attention to your grooming and appearance so that you look your best. These are all parts of the Separation phase; the break from normal life.

When the interview ends, you move into the Incorporation phase. What is up for grabs is quite literally whether you will be incorporated into the company. If the Elders of the company agree to incorporate you, your status changes from “available for work” to not available and there are a variety of culturally prescribed ramifications including tax payments, banking arrangements and your formal incorporation into the company via whatever onboarding and training they need to give you.

In short, a job interview is a paradigm example of a rite of passage from an anthropological point of view.

Since a job interview is a rite of passage, the question then arises: why don’t we think of it in those terms? My guess is this: we are unconscious of the rites of passage in our own culture. An anthropologist traipsing through the jungle with some strange tribe is acutely aware of the rites of passage of that tribe because they are foreign to him or her. Once you’ve viewed or studied enough different cultures, you can learn to see the formal, outward markers of a rite of passage. But from within a culture, you don’t see a rite of passage as such because it’s just a part of the culture. We experience our own culture subjectively, not objectively.

But there’s a more philosophical reason why we don’t recognise our own rites of passage and this relates to van Gennep’s concept of religion which he defined as metaphysics + magic. Magic can be further defined as a ceremony which achieves a specific effect in line with the metaphysical assumptions of the culture.

We seem to be in the middle of exactly such a religious crisis in modern Western society and this implies that our metaphysics, the religious basis of society which grounds our rites of passage, is starting to fail to produce the magic. We have already identified one element of that metaphysics. A job interview is a rite of passage the magic of which is to create an employee who will contribute to the economic prosperity of a company. The economic prosperity of companies is the basis for the economy of our society. The underlying assumption, the metaphysics, is capitalism. In order to understand the other main pillars of our metaphysics we first need to zoom out and do a quick historical overview.

One of the main reasons this could happen was because of the way in which Christianity got integrated into the Roman Empire in its later phase. In Roman society in general, there was never a separation of church and state. What we would call administrators also had a religious function. This was also true of the highest political offices. When Christianity became the state religion, what we call bishops retained the old administrative functions and implemented the new religion alongside them. The word bishop comes from the Latin episcopus which simply means “watcher” or “overseer”. It was a title given to government officials.

In the aftermath of the Roman Empire in western and northern Europe, something of the administrative and organisational structure of the church remained in place including the bishops and their boss, the Pope. At that time, the glory of Rome was not forgotten by the barbarian tribes of Europe and they were eager to align themselves with it. That seems to be the marketing angle that the bishops and other churchmen used to win over the various warlords and create a unified region under Christianity. For a brief period, the Pope really was the boss.

Over time, the political leaders of the region came to resent the power of the Pope and some even went to war against him. Eventually, a kind of equilibrium was reached in which the church, following the pattern inherited from Rome, retained a significant share of the administrative functions including control of education, scholarship, the sciences and bureaucratic record keeping.

We said above that a philosophical challenge to the metaphysics of a society implies a religious crisis. That is what the arrival of Luther represented. Luther was a gifted scholar and intellectual who wrote extensively. Much of what he wrote is very hard for us to understand these days but one thing rings through very clearly even to modern ears. Luther denied the authority of the bishops and the Pope. For him, they had strayed far too much into worldly affairs and forgotten the religious basis of their role. Forget the fact that the church had always been involved in worldly affairs ever since its beginning in ancient Rome. Forget the fact that it was solely because of the church that anything resembling civilisation even existed in northern Europe. Luther wanted them gone.

The religious crisis that Luther led eventually led to the metaphysical basis for our modern society, although mostly in ways that Luther would have despised.

Firstly, the reason Luther had support from the kings and princes of Europe was because they saw the opportunity to reduce the power of the church. It took all the way til the 19^th and 20^th centuries, but eventually the state finally pried the last administrative and cultural functions of education and record keeping out of the hands of the bishops and popes. We swapped bishops for bureaucrats. Since bureaucrats are not Elders, there was a vacuum. That vacuum was filled by another group: the Technocrats.

Consider the two most important rites of passage in any society: birth and death. Once upon a time, these were presided over by priests as our religious Elders. Not any more. Where are we born and where do we die? In hospital. Who presides over our birth and death: doctors.

Doctors have become the Elders who navigate us through the rites of birth and death. Ergo, doctors and technocrats more generally, have become our religious Elders. Once upon a time, a baptism was the rite of passage by which we joined society and the baptism certificate was the official proof of our existence. Now, a doctor fills out a birth certificate and a death certificate. Same rites of passage, different Elder and, more importantly, different metaphysics.

Luther and the other protestants were responsible for this development for at least two reasons. Firstly, they demanded to get rid of the religious Elders of bishops and priests. For them, we didn’t need an earthly Elder since we had Jesus as our spiritual Elder and we could answer to him directly. Nice idea. Doesn’t seem to work in practice.

There remains just the political sphere to talk about and let’s again skip the detailed analysis by simply pointing out that a democratic election is a paradigm example of a rite of passage. Here in Australia, the Separation phase involves the Governor General dissolving parliament. The Transition phase is the election campaign itself and the Incorporation phase is the swearing in of the new parliament all done with a ceremony and pomp befitting an old-fashioned rite of passage.

How does parliamentary democracy relate to the Reformation? Well, the protestants wanted to run their churches in a completely democratic fashion with elders and other officials elected by popular vote of the congregation. This mostly never happened because the princes and kings of Europe did not want to encourage democratic tendencies among their subjects. It took a few hundred years and a few decapitated kings for the protestants to win the argument.

From this historical overview, we can see the metaphysical foundations of the modern West ushered in by the religious crisis of the Reformation are democracy, capitalism and science. Each of these has its own societal Elders. Each of these has its magic (ceremony + effect) which is manifested in the rites of passage of our culture.

The one thing many westerners seem to agree on is that democracy isn’t working and after the last few years of inflation, capitalism isn’t looking too crash hot either. That leaves the third metaphysical foundation of modern society: science. As we saw during corona, science has become corrupted too. That message has been reinforced in just the last couple of weeks with the growing scandal around plagiarism in academia. What lies beneath that scandal is the fact that most of modern academia is a fraud that is riding on the coattails of the faith (and it really is faith) that the general public has in science.    

Those are the broad terms of the religious crisis that has been building now for several decades in the West. What makes our crises different from the Reformation is that the Reformation was led by the heroic figure of Luther. By contrast, nobody is leading our crisis. Rather, our crisis presents itself as a force of nature like green slime bubbling up from the sewer. In next week’s post, we’ll try and identify where the slime is coming from.

To finish off what’s ended up becoming a little series of posts on the subject of archetypal transformations, I thought I’d focus on a couple of stories that show us a “successful” transition from the Adult to the Elder. Stories featuring a hero making the Elder transition are vanishingly rare in the modern world.

I had a quick browse through a few top 100 movie lists and couldn’t see a single story that features an Elder as hero. Another search revealed this list of the “best movies about old age”. I hadn’t heard of a single one of them, which just goes to show how popular stories about Elders are in our culture. For all these reasons, it will be a useful exercise to outline what a “real” Elder looks like and that’s what we’ll do in this post, albeit by looking at literary and films versions of the archetype.

In the last couple of posts, we’ve examined the failure of the archetypal progression to Elder as exemplified in Shakespeare’s King Lear (and also, less obviously, in Macbeth). We’ve also seen that the failure of the Elder transformation is accompanied by the rise of the hyper-masculine since Elderhood implies the tempering of Will by Soul; something which is true at the individual and the societal level.  

We have captured these generalisations in the table of archetypal progressions:-

	Physical	Exoteric	Esoteric
Child	Pre-puberty	N/A	Imagination
Orphan	Puberty	Student, apprentice	Intellect
Adult	Maturity	Economic, political, spiritual, sexual	Will
Elder	Old Age (menopause)	Mentor, Elder, (Retired)	Soul

For male heroes, the Soul is represented by one or more female characters and this is in keeping with Carl Jung’s point that the Soul in man is the feminine anima while for women it is the masculine animus. Thus, Cordelia represents the positive anima for King Lear – the prospect of a successful transition to Elder – while Goneril and Regan represent the shadow anima; the failure of the transition.

Note that I am using the Jungian concept of the shadow here in a modified sense to refer specifically to archetypal transformations. What I have been implying with the above table is that each archetypal transition is itself a confrontation with the Unconscious. In Freudian terms, the archetypal transition comes up from the id (the Unconscious) and challenges the ego. Our mission is to incorporate the archetype and, in doing so, to transcend it. When we succeed, we progress to the next archetype. Failure to transcend does not leave us where we started, however. Rather, the “energy” from that archetype gets channeled into the shadow part of the psyche.

We can capture this by adding a column to our table as follows:-

	Physical	Exoteric	Esoteric (positive)	Esoteric (shadow)
Child	Pre-puberty	N/A	Imagination	Dissociation
Orphan	Puberty	Student, apprentice	Intellect	Ideology
Adult	Maturity	Economic, political, spiritual, sexual	Will	Hyper-masculine, devouring feminine
Elder	Old Age (menopause)	Mentor, Elder, (Retired)	Soul	N/A

The failure to transcend from Adult to Elder leads to the shadow form of the Adult will: hyper-masculine and devouring feminine. The failure to transcend from Orphan to Adult leads to the shadow form of the Orphan: Ideology instead of Intellect. The failure to transcend childhood into adolescence leaves one dissociated from reality.

These combinations hold true at the societal level too. The institutions of society function as the Soul of society. When they are just, they keep the rest of society in balance. When those institutions become corrupt, everything goes out of balance. The Will turns into the hyper-masculine/devouring feminine. Intellect becomes Ideology. Imagination becomes dissociation. What all this implies is that the archetypal progressions cannot be avoided. All you can do is push their energy into the Unconscious.

At the beginning of the story, we find Faust alone in his study in a state of suicidal depression. Faust is lamenting what he perceives to be the wasted years of his adult life. He is on the verge of the Elder transition and is not off to a good start.

That bad start is going to be made worse by the arrival of the devil and here we have a prime example of the symbolism often used by literature and film to represent the difficulties of the archetypal progressions. The devil in this case represents what we have just called the shadow. He symbolises the parts of Faust that are pulling against the transition to the Elder archetype. 

Of course, these things are not purely psychological in nature. In the real world, there really do exist people who do not have our best interests at heart. This is not necessarily because they wish evil for us. Most of the time, they are simply pursuing what they think is best for themselves. The psychological aspect is the extent to which we allow ourselves to be influenced by those who lead us right or those who lead us wrong.   

Luke Skywalker and Hamlet are both offered the same devil’s bargain. Palpatine tells Luke to kill Darth Vader. The ghost tells Hamlet to kill his uncle (surrogate father). In a Freudian sense, killing the father represents the failure to overcome the Oedipus Complex and develop the super-ego. It would therefore condemn the individual to a lifetime stuck at the developmental level of the Child.

The Orphan must transcend the father, not kill him. More symbolically, the Orphan must incorporate the energy coming from the Unconscious, not deny it. The failure to do so simply funnels the “energy” into the shadow of the psyche. For the Orphan, that means a reversion to the Child and the dissociation from reality.

What is being offered to Skywalker and Hamlet is the avoidance of their archetypal mission. The same is true of Faust. The devil offers a different bargain but one that is perfectly formulated for the avoidance of the Elder transition. We know that the Adult archetype is associated with the faculty of Will. It is no coincidence, then, that the devil offers Faust the unlimited fulfilment of his Will. He may have anything in the world. In exchange, the devil will take his Soul. This is quite literally the negation of the archetypal transcendence from Adult to Elder. Faust must integrate his Soul. Instead, he sells it to the devil.

To deny the archetypal mission brings ruin as we have seen with Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. We already know that Faust is in for the same treatment since the title of the work is Faust: A Tragedy.  Since Faust is at the Elder stage of life, it’s a tragedy of the Elder and we can expect something similar to King Lear.

We know from last week’s post that the negation of the Elder transition leads to the hyper-masculine and that is exactly what happens in the story of Faust. The twist is that it is Faust himself who reverts to the hyper-masculine driven on by infinite energy of the devil.

It would take Goethe another 25 years to finish Part Two and so we can presume that he had much time to deliberate on what to write. Part Two is a hard work to parse as it is rich in symbolism. But, for our archetypal analysis, the meaning of it is very clear. It is the redemption arc of the story. Faust failed his Elder transition in Part One. In Part Two he is going to make good. We see this quite clearly in the opening scene where the angel Ariel makes an appeal to forgive Faust and we also see it in the closing scene where another angel declares “He who strives on can earn redemption still.”

Near the beginning of Part Two, Faust descends to the “realm of mothers” to bring back the ideal form of beauty. Symbolically, this represents the first step on the path to transcendence. Faust is no longer denying the urge which is coming up from the Unconscious but facing it head on. That urge represents the desire to learn what beauty is. Having learned that, Faust then sets about trying implement it in the real world.

He wins a battle on behalf of the emperor and is assigned some land where he puts his plans into action. Note that this is an almost identical set up to the beginning of Macbeth but, unlike Macbeth, Faust devotes himself to governing the lands assigned to him as best he can rather than striving after more power. He is tempering his Will by Soul realised in the pursuit of beauty. In doing so, he becomes the Elder at the societal level in the form of a just ruler.

The reason the finale of Faust has been so misunderstood is for two related reasons.

Firstly, Goethe named the second book Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy. That implies that Faust is going to be ruined yet again. In fact, the opposite occurs. Since Faust wins in the end, this technically makes the second book a comedy, not a tragedy as the title suggests.

It is impossible that a scholar of the Classical such a Goethe could have used this technique accidentally and so we can only assume he did it on purpose, thus emphasising the comedic ending and making the title playfully misleading.     

No less a philologist than Nietzsche seems to have misunderstood the meaning of the ending of Faust since he used the phrase the eternal feminine sardonically numerous times in his own writing. Can it be a coincidence that Nietzsche’s will-to-power is the philosophy of the hyper-masculine?

Because of the strange nature of the ending to Faust, it seems many readers have simply ignored it. If you do that, you can end up with a quite different reading of the story and one that foregrounds the hyper-masculine elements. I suspect that’s also why Spengler chose to use the phrase “Faustian” to describe modern western civilisation.

The hero of the film, played by one of the great actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a theatre director, Caden Cotard. Cotard’s wife and daughter leave him early in the film and we know this signals danger since these are symbols of his anima. Cotard’s Soul has gone missing in action. He needs to find it.

Cotard will not be tempted by the devil but does receive a very similar offer in the form of a MacArthur grant which sets him up financially for the rest of his life. He determines to spend the endowment creating a theatre piece of “brutal honesty”. What occurs next is very similar to Faust’s journey through the ancient Greek imagination in Faust Part Two only far more self-referential and postmodern. Cotard hires an actor to play himself. His theatre piece of brutal honesty becomes a replay of his own life now in symbolic form.

While all this is going on, Cotard’s physical condition is steadily deteriorating and it’s in this way that the movie is, in fact, a work of brutal honesty since Kaufmann does not shy away from this aspect of aging. Cotard eventually hands over the directorial duties of his play to a female character while himself taking on a job as a cleaner. We should know by now that the new female theatre director represents Cotard’s anima. She begins directing both Cotard and the man who is acting as Cotard in the theatre piece.

What this symbolises is that the successful transition to the Elder role involves giving up control to your Soul. At the societal level, it means handing over of the reins of power to the next generation having ensured they are ready for the task, something which Lear failed to do and which also does not happen in Faust. Cotard ceases to be the boss and becomes the servant. The Elder transition is the final transcendence of ego and the incorporation of what Jung called the Self.

Arguably, Goethe meant something very similar in the finale of Faust. Faust’s ultimate fate is not in his own hands. Only the intervention of the eternal feminine saves him and rescues his Soul from the devil. It was the tacked-on nature of the finale and the comedic and playful style of its delivery which backgrounded this reading and can lead to an interpretation of Faust as the hyper-masculine. Kaufmann leaves no doubt in the matter. He has his hero physically degrade before our very eyes. There is no way to view Cotard as hyper-masculine and yet he continues to work, think and dream until the very end just like Faust.

For those who haven’t seen it but are interested, you should know that Synecdoche: New York is a pretentious movie and you will probably be tempted to switch it off halfway through. It’s also a masterpiece of storytelling and possibly the greatest film ever made. I recommend persevering to the end and then re-watching it. Every time I’ve watched it, I’ve noticed things I missed earlier.

But, of course, it was a box office flop. We live in the Faustian culture, the culture of the hyper-masculine/shadow feminine. Kaufmann gave us a hero that, unlike Faust, cannot be interpreted in the way that our culture demands. For us, the Elder reeks of death and “giving up”. Which is true. The Elder transition is the facing of death and that’s something that even Goethe seemed to want to avoid. I’m sure Kaufmann needed every bit of “brutal honesty” to make his film.

But one of the things that both stories make clear is that the Elder archetype is not about just sitting in a chair waiting to die. It’s about the pursuit of beauty and truth. The Elder becomes a servant to beauty and truth. That is only a degradation and “giving up” from the point of view of the ego.

To the extent that Elders end up in positions of authority, they will make their society beautiful and truthful. The alternative is the lies and deceits of the hyper-masculine and shadow feminine. I’ll leave to the reader to decide which sort of society we are living in.

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Just a quick final note to say that I’ll be taking the next two weeks off to enjoy the summer holidays here in Australia (I will be responding to comments, though).

I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and happy new year. See you on the 9^th January for a new year of blog posts.