Facing the Dragon

by Robert L. Moore

  In summary, premodern cultures often used conscious ritualization to put limits on the kind of aggressive and acquisitive behavior that flourishes today without any such limits. Some rituals in tribal culture limited aggression, and other rituals limited conspicuous consumption and its results. Modern culture today, in sharp contrast, has no effective rituals that limit aggression, and no effective rituals that limit conspicuous consumption and acquisition.

  Humans always engage in ritualization, either consciously or unconsciously. What I mean by ritual is someone taking conscious responsibility for leading a group to do things that need to be done. Conscious ritual leadership is something far different from acting out or pseudo-ritualization. Many of these archetypal acting- out ritual forms are not conscious or contained. That is to say, leaders may follow certain ritualized behaviors without understanding the ritual purposes of what they are doing.

  For example, our leaders in the Vietnam War did limit aggression in a certain way, but they didn't know what they were doing in any kind of conscious psychological ritual sense. The decisions not to bomb certain areas were not made on the basis of ritual judgments, though they might have been grounded in some unconscious awareness.

  Jungian psychology stresses the need to relate consciously to the archetypal patterns and energies. Jungian thought requires an ethic of awareness. It is not enough to act out obsessive, compulsive rituals. The archetypal configurations that we do not ritualize consciously, we are condemned to act out unconsciously. That is a fundamental premise of all my work now, and it has enormous social, political, and ethical implications for global culture.

  In an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Last Rite,” Douglas Gillette and I argue that there is an unconscious archetypal pressure toward total war that the world will act out unless a new planetary spiritual consciousness develops and intervenes to deal with the pressure. Some kind of great cleansing and spiritual transformation of Planet Earth seems guaranteed by the mounting pressure of grandiose energies in the human psyche. We see two alternatives: (a) the human species will act out its grandiose energies and get “purified” in a great fireball, a third World War, or (b) we will learn consciously how to sacrifice our infantile grandiosity and take conscious responsibility for making the changes we need to realize a great spiritual transformation. Here the deconstructionists are our allies by putting limits on literalism, for we must not take literally the need to immolate and dismember the human species.4 The fundamentalist eagerness for Armageddon is simply an unconscious literalization of the imperative for transformation.

  The apocalypse myth rests on the insistent archetypes of death and rebirth that you find in the dreams of children all over the world. The myth of a great conflagration occurs in every major tradition of world mythology. An appendix to our manuscript gives fifty pages of quotations from these myths of a great fire.

  Those who work and think in a Jungian framework cannot ignore these archetypal imperatives in the psyche. Myths for a Jungian theorist are not the same as myths for some academic mythologists. Jungians know that these myths are psychoactive whether anyone else realizes it or not, whether anyone else likes it or not. You cannot avoid the influence of archetypes, because they are in your hardware. You only have the two alternatives of relating to them consciously and responsibly, or acting them out unconsciously. That's my basic assumption. If we choose the latter, the fundamentalists will lead us into the abyss.

  Even those parts of the tribal rituals that provoke disgust in us today had an important role in limiting aggression and destruction. We moderns may frown morally when we learn they sacrificed their captives and ate them, for example, but it was usually only a few people, and then they would not conduct any more raids for a while. They usually did not get into a stance of having to kill off all the members of the opposing tribe. Hatred was somewhat contained. In any case, the primitive sacrifices still seem morally superior to the brutal and grotesque genocidal practices of modern warfare. The modern ego apparently finds it hard to face the fact that in our wars we engage unconsciously in large-scale human sacrifice (see Williams 1991, Bailie 1995).

  Audience: When you talk about the importance of consciously ritualizing, does that mean ritualizing with understanding?

  Moore: Yes, the ritual has to be conscious and led by a ritual elder. First we need an understanding of how the plumbing of human consciousness works, and how it feeds into social, intergroup, interreligious, and international relationships. Then we must have conscious ritual leadership.

  Audience: But how was it possible to ritualize with understanding in the premodern world? You are not promoting a return to that premodern kind of ritualization, are you? I am trying to understand the difference.

  Moore: Okay, let me address that some more. This is one of the things scholars of premodern tribal cultures have discovered that was not understood by early Christian anthropologists who assumed Christianity was superior to the tribal cultures in every way. Of course, this seems like embarrassing arrogance to us today, because they really didn't understand them at all. They didn't realize the incredible sophistication of tribal ritual elders and their ritual processes, and their relationship to consciousness.

  Most tribal cultures were, in fact, light years ahead of us in their understanding of the relationship between ritualization and consciousness. Few psychologists and psychoanalysts today know anything about it. Only a handful of people in the world are even studying how ritual relates to psychological processes, as in Victor Turner's work. Some sophisticated psychologists are only now beginning to realize that transference might actually be a ritual phenomenon, and the psychoanalyst a ritual elder in a transformative process. The classic Freudian point of view was that anyone engaged in ritual was just crazy. It is just embarrassing how naive we are on this.

  Nonetheless, the cutting edge in psychoanalytic theory today is to understand that ritualization processes affect the human psyche. The great breakthrough came when Erik Erikson began to point out ritualization in the psyche. We have made a lot of progress since then, but not a lot in terms of what needs to be done. Much of my own work has been in this area.

  Take hypnosis, for example, an old ritual phenomenon. Modern Christian antagonism toward magic is based on some early anthropologists who did not understand magic at all. Magic is nothing more than understanding the relationship between what you do in ritual and the kind of consciousness that issues from it. If you were an old tribal medicine man and you realized it was time for a war party, you knew the ritual for creating a warrior. When all the young warriors came back home, you knew the ritual for turning those warriors back into herdsmen again. You had to teach them how to take care of all those horses they stole during the war!

  By contrast, think about what happened to our Vietnam War veterans. Our hospitals all over the country are full of young warriors, not so young now, because we failed them. They were made into warriors by incompetent ritual elders who were ritually tone deaf, a bunch of drill sergeants who knew how to turn people into “shadow warriors” who did not know the moral responsibilities of a true warrior. When the young warriors came home, we failed to bring them together for a dance where they could dance their way out of being warriors and back into being herdsmen. We scattered them instead into VA hospitals all across the country. We knew how to make them killers, but we did not know how to dance them into being civilians who could deal effectively with their issues, and have families, and build communities.

  These young men know that something is wrong. If you ever work with any of them or get to know them, you will find that they know they were betrayed by their leaders. The great tragedy is that we have not done enough work on spirituality and ritual to understand how we betrayed them. Among the many other ways, we betrayed them with our ignorance of ritual process.

  Audience: Did this also happen after World War II, and if not, what was the difference then?

  Moore: This happens after every modern war, but w
ith some differences. After World War II we still had some vestiges of a religious order more or less in place, and the young soldiers could come back feeling they had fought in a moral war, whether that was true or not. They could still come back into a partially intact cosmos, in other words, a world. After World War II, America to some degree still had a sacred canopy. After Korea, it was collapsing, and by the time Vietnam arrived, we no longer had a functional sacred canopy. In the process of modernization, the sacred canopy of myth has collapsed, and that means we have nothing to return home to.5

  Today we no longer have even a tribal cosmos. This is like the American Indian whose tribal cosmos collapses on him, with nothing left but a self-destructive use of alcohol, drugs, and gambling. This collapse, however, is happening to all of us today, not just to the American Indians. We are all addicted to self-medication now, what I call the “demonic sacraments.”

  Audience: One way to regulate our consumption through ritual might be for President Bush to offer Poland some of our Fortune 500 executives for a few years to revitalize the Polish economy.

  Moore: There are many possible ways to imagine ritual. It is helpful and instructive to engage in creative reflection on this important common task. Intelligent people everywhere should consider what new concrete actions and ritualizations would help achieve global spiritual transformation.

  Suppose, for instance, that you belonged to a brainstorming group looking for possible solutions, and I said to you, “Okay, team, our task now is to formulate a new strategy for developing human consciousness and behavior in these problem areas. What concrete rituals would you recommend for creating a new global awareness to limit aggression and consumption?” This is, I think, an important task of the highest priority for the human future. If people really want to do something concrete to solve these serious problems, they must look not merely to economic and political theory, but to what they can contribute personally toward spiritual transformative leadership.

  Audience: What function do professional sports such as football play? Would that be a ritualization?

  Moore: Yes, sports are an unconscious ritualization to inhibit aggression. Our most aggressive violent sports are unconscious ritualizations. They are really acting out, but they are better than nothing, because if you were to shut down professional sports in this country for a year, the enormous increase in violence and violent crime would blow your mind, maybe literally.

  When the leaders of culture forget how to dance, or forget how to throw a dance, what do we turn to? The best we have today is the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson. They still know how to throw a dance, and it works for a while, but it doesn't work the way we need for it to work. We need conscious, competent, effective ritual leadership addressing our global human situation. Anything less is “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

  Audience: What do you think about Paul Ricoeur?

  Moore: Ricoeur's approach is important in terms of deliteralization, but I don't think he provides much of a solution to the larger pressing problems, because his work is not much of a resource for issues of ritual containment. I am a practical man. I am a professor, yes, but I am also an analyst and consultant. I deal with real people and real problems. I don't think a merely academic mode of analysis will solve the problems of the planet. Psychoanalysis limited to the consulting room won't solve the problems either. There simply is not enough time for us to train enough analysts, nor enough money to get people into analysis, to address the human crisis we are in now.

  While I am saying what will not work, deconstructionism is not going to work either. There is a lot of fascination today with deconstructionism and postmodernism, the latest fads in criticism and analysis. I agree that we need to get past literalism, but most of the deconstructionists never deal with the issue of how to say something significant and transformative and put things back together. We need to construct a cosmos, a habitat for humanity and its relatives.

  NOTES

  1. The material in chapters 3 through 8 and chapter 10 comes from edited transcripts of six sessions of lecture and discussion led by Robert Moore on Saturday and Sunday, July 15–16, 1989, at the C. G. Jung Institute in Chicago, Illinois. The program was entitled “Jungian Psychology and Human Spirituality: Liberation from Tribalism in Religious Life.” This chapter represents the opening session on Saturday morning, July 15, 1989.

  2. This research was carried out by Dr. J. Gordon Melton, author of the much acclaimed Encyclopedia of American Religions. Unfortunately, lack of adequate funding delayed completion of this visionary project. Potential donors to its completion should contact Dr. Melton directly.

  3. The Council for the World Parliament of Religions has done important work on this task.

  4. For a recent treatment of this theme, see Edward Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse: A Jungian Study of the Book of Revelation (1999) and Moore and Douglas Gillette, “The Last Rite” (unpublished manuscript, 1989).

  5. Chapter 4 looks at Eliade's idea of the cosmos as a world where the sacred canopy has not collapsed. See also Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967) and Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind (1973).

  CHAPTER 4

  Modern Secularism Fuels Pathological Narcissism

  Apart from God everything is alien and remote and is held together simply by force. Satan by dint of his superior spiritual powers has succeeded in leading men astray by suggesting to them that they will become as gods. But by the pursuit of evil and by the substitution of himself for God, man, so far from becoming the God-like being of his dreams, becomes the slave of his lower nature, and, at the same time, by losing his higher nature becomes subject to natural necessity and ceases to be spiritually determined from within.

  —Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit

  THE HEALERS, THE RITUAL ELDERS –WHAT I WOULD CALL the magi – have always been aware that you need to have a diagnosis before you can start a treatment. Some people in psychotherapy differ with that today, but I choose to go against their opinions and stay with the wisdom of the vast majority of the human community. We need to understand the plumbing of this problem. The exciting thing to me is that a number of scholarly analyses have appeared in recent years which, when put together, present a very coherent picture of our situation. This chapter introduces some of the scholars who show us how to diagnose modernity, and then it describes how their interpretations relate to the new contemporary crisis in unconscious grandiosity.1

  DIAGNOSING THE MODERN SECULAR LOSS OF THE SACRED

  First is Peter Berger, one of the great contemporary sociologists for anyone interested in this material. Berger studied how modernization led to fragmentation in human personality and culture in such books as The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1973), A Rumor of Angels (1969), The Sacred Canopy (1967), and The Heretical Imperative (1979). His work provides a sophisticated sociology-of-knowledge critique of modernity that parallels Eliade and a number of others. We have available today some very sophisticated studies of how the modernization process has influenced our psychological functioning.

  Another scholar that many Jungians do not like, but I increasingly admire, is Peter Homans. Some dislike him because he used a Kohutian self psychology approach to understand the conflict between Freud and Jung, and he pointed to Jung's narcissistic pathology which, in my view, was substantial. It is important to understand that most people have narcissistic pathology, so this is not to dismiss Jung. We all have narcissistic problems. Someone has suggested that we need a “Humans Anonymous Twelve Step Program,” to help everyday people deal with their residual narcissistic pathology, and I agree. It's another way of saying that we need a more practical approach to our spirituality if we are to be effective in containing and channeling our grandiose energies.

  You should read the book by Peter Homans, Jung in Context (1979), for an analysis of what happens in the modernization process. Then
read his new book about “modernity and the mourning process” where he elaborates further how he understands the psychology of modernization (Homans 1989). These two books together will give you a more sophisticated understanding of the loss that we suffered as modernization and secularization occurred. What we lost is enormous, contrary to what many modern secularists think.

  What was the enormous loss? It was the loss of conscious ritual contact with the realm of the sacred. Before anyone had studied the psychology of this, you could take the line of thought that said, “Now we are free,” the French Enlightenment fantasy. “Now we are free of kings, free of priests, and free of all of those religious people telling us what to do. Now we can save humanity and have true civilization.” The Enlightenment fantasy was a beautiful, wonderful fantasy. The history of the modern world since that time shows the fantasy of expecting progress without spirituality. “Just get rid of all this God stuff and all this priest nonsense, and we can have progress unlimited.” Then, of course, we get the Titanic, the unsinkable ship of enlightened secularization and technology.

  The pride of the modern West came to its height right before World War I just as our enlightened civilization began to peak out. We believed we had an unsinkable ship with an increasing sophistication among civilizations. Not only were we Christian; we were scientifically advanced. We had the Germany of Goethe and the England of David Hume and the great positivistic nonbelievers, the world that came to be the world of Bertrand Russell. What do we have here?

  Audience: “The Proud Tower.”

  Moore: Yes, so you get the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic, and all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of World War I. Of course, the American Civil War was the beginning of modern warfare, but it was just barely the beginning, because they didn't have real machine guns yet. World War I was the first war to put the full-blown results of modernization into warfare.