Facing the Dragon

by Robert L. Moore

  We never quite get around to the actual slaying, except maybe in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but you intuit the need to “slay” your same-sex giant or dragon, because it represents this grandiose presence within. The only thing that can be slain, however, is an ego organization that has merged unconsciously with the great dragon. The great dragon cannot be killed. It must be related to in a conscious way (see Edinger 1999). No matter how old you are, you are not an adult until you have slain that unconscious identification with the grandiose presence within. That is what human initiation is all about. Initiation is death. There must be a ritual slaying of this particular monster.

  We love to tell everyone else to slay their monsters. Whatever my race is, I love to urge you to slay your race's monsters. Whatever my religion is, I love to tell you to slay your religion's monsters, but I don't necessarily want to slay mine. Whatever my gender is, I want the other gender to slay its monsters, even though I resist facing the monsters in mine. That is how it works.

  Audience: I keep thinking of that awful news story where a bunch of boys attacked that young woman in Central Park. Isn't that the same sort of thing? Because they went after her, but all they said was they were “wilding.” That was their excuse.

  Moore: Yes, there are little boy kings, little unconscious gods, what I call “monster boys.” Unfortunately, unconscious grandiosity is an “equal opportunity employer.” It afflicts minorities and the poor as well as the privileged and the wealthy. If you understand this, then you can understand why we see such widespread and increasing anxiety and antisocial behaviors at all levels and all social locations in contemporary culture.

  Unconscious gods have no limits in their fantasies. This is the satanic manifestation of the God image. The satanic impulse always has no limits. It is the mark of a Lucifer complex when you have no limits on your behavior or your claims. That is widespread, not just in men, but particularly in men. It is the runaway inflated warrior, the rape-and-pillage warrior, the Darth Vader warrior, because there is no true and good king to whom this kind of warrior is willing to submit and give service. This requires study of the history of the sacral king and the values in sacral kingship. The king's whole being was to create justice, protect the poor, and protect the weak. The sacral king had incredible radical morality and justice built into his responsibilities (Moore and Gillette 1991). Knights serving the sacral king were responsible for upholding those values and making war on anyone who was unjust, that is, anyone trying to bring chaos into the world.

  The boy king, however, or the boy warrior, will use the enormous AK-47 firepower they have and turn it against their own community and against civilization. That is the difference between the shadow king or shadow warrior, and the true king or true warrior. Chaos and cosmos are always at war with each other in myth. The true warrior fights for cosmos, and shadow warriors want chaos. Any time two people come into conflict, we constellate the human tendency to clash and split. It is always the other person who is the partisan of chaos, while I am the pure one fighting for the right order of the cosmos. So we pair off and act this thing out, each carrying the shadow projections of the other. This is the tragic history of our species on earth.

  In human affairs, if you study history, it has been a holocaust. That is not just one holocaust. If you study the history of childhood, that is a mega-holocaust. The history of women is a mega-holocaust. The more history you know, the less of a romantic, naïve, New Age, humanistic psychologist you will be. Those people like Professor Don Browning (1987) at the University of Chicago who equate Jung with Pollyanna humanistic psychologists are mistaken (see also Sanford 1987). The reason Jung got into trouble with Victor White was because he believed that the privatio boni doctrine did not adequately address the reality and power of radical evil (see Lammers 1994). Jung believed that radical evil was real, aggressive, and opportunistic. It is a psychic malignancy issuing in possession states where the unconscious human ego gets invaded and colonized by archetypal energies that it does not believe really exist or interprets in a fundamentalist, tribal religious framework.

  We must distinguish between the Lucifer complex and the personal shadow. You can, as a human being, appropriately integrate your personal shadow. If what you call your shadow is only that part of you that wants to shine, then you need to integrate that psychological potential and become more radiant. The ego unconsciously identifying with the Lucifer complex, however, presents a far different situation. Jung talked about “spirit complexes” that you cannot integrate and must not try to integrate. If you try in a simplistic way to integrate yourself with the Christ complex, you will become psychotic.2 If you identify with the satanic complex and begin to incarnate it, you will become a sociopath. The patterns of sociopathic behavior are very similar, because they are not personal but archetypal in their manifestation.

  What are some other examples of the old enemies? Yahweh and who else? Baal. Zoroastrianism has Ahura Mazda, creator of earth, sky, and humans, and his enemy Ahriman, the destructive spirit.

  What about the Hindu epic Ramayana? Does anyone know Indonesian and Hindu mythology? I recently traveled in Indonesia, and it is fascinating. They do not have very much television, but when they do, it is the Ramayana being acted out. When you go to the villages on Saturday night, and all the teenagers come out, they have their playhouse acting out the Ramayana. The Ramayana presents this great epic struggle, kind of like Beowulf, between the great Lord and incarnation of God whose name is Rama, the true Lord, and his enemy the demon Ravana. He is usually portrayed as having this incredible bright red mask. I have a great Ravana mask, and once you look through that you feel the power of the archetypal shadow.3

  There are many other examples, Christ and Satan, for example. Any others?

  Audience: Dionysus?

  Moore: Dionysus is not usually considered an incarnation of radical evil.

  Audience: Mars?

  Moore: Mars is the god of war, but you do not get much of a clear split there. The more primitive mythologies are one thing, but the Greeks had many different stages in which they got their mythology cleaned up. You need to go back to some very old myths. You see this dual presence of good and evil more clearly the more archaic the mythic materials.

  For example, people sometimes say to me, “What about Buddhism? There is no evil in Buddhism.” They did not study Buddhist mythology but only Buddhist philosophy. The philosophers do not get into this too much, because it is too messy, but in Buddhist mythology, the Buddha clearly has to fight the lord of the demons. Very few have studied the relationship of Buddha with sacral kingship. There is an interesting story about Buddha, the true king, and Mara, the king of the demons. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, Buddha is almost ready for his enlightenment when Mara attacks with all the hosts of evil. Just as they are about to overwhelm the Buddha, he reaches down and touches the earth, and suddenly the demons are gone. Isn't that interesting in light of what we have been talking about?4

  Audience: I was wondering what you make of the pairs. I just finished reading The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler. I think she was saying that Baal would represent the goddess and the feminine, and Yahweh the nomadic conqueror would see that as being evil, even though it really was not.

  Moore: Yes, that is right. I'm not saying these are really evil, but that the human mind tends to split and polarize. What I would disagree with here is that I think Eisler's view represents a feminine inflation: “If we could just return to the goddess, everything would be fine, because there are no arrogant goddesses. Only the gods are arrogant.” That is just female grandiosity. All humans and all genders tend to inflate. They all have to struggle with their own temptation to try to be the center. So I don't agree with Eisler's book very much. It is just an inversion of the patriarchal problem.

  Audience: Even though she prefers partnership to domination?

  Moore: Yes, because Eisler demonizes the masculine in that book. Of all people, I am not one who will stand for
demonizing the masculine. The masculine is not demonic. Men get inflated and act out demonically just as women do. I agree that partnership is a key idea, but I don't think Eisler's book is likely to facilitate much partnership.

  Audience: In a world of nonduality, like some Buddhist and Oriental philosophies or theology, can you rise “beyond good and evil,” like Nietzsche?

  Moore: Yes, but Nietzsche is not a good example, because he rose up “beyond good and evil” into a psychotic inflation. When someone says they have risen up “beyond good and evil,” it usually indicates an unconscious grandiosity. A magus who had achieved that state would not speak about it except in an esoteric inner community.

  This is also true of many forms of New Age mysticism. They are incredibly inflated. They have no way to deal with their own shadow, so you get this enormous acting out, like the “great” Buddhist leader who recently contracted AIDS and carelessly infected many of his chelas. Not that they are any worse at it than Christians, Jews, or Muslims. They just have not solved the problem. Sitting around and meditating does not automatically enable you to face your grandiose shadow.

  Audience: You indicate that by having a relationship with a Supreme Being, one should theoretically have less grandiosity and humanize, but you also imply that you need to have human relationship to bring you back down to earth.

  Moore: I believe you need both. Grandiose energies are so present and so powerful in everyone's life that you need both resources. One is a connection with a positive transpersonal or archetypal center, and the other is participation in human relationships. They both remind you of the limitations of your ego, that you are a creature.

  Jung was right about this. Without authentic and grounded relationships, you can easily get a little bit crazy, because you have no one to challenge your inflation. Human relationships in and of themselves are obviously not enough, however, because most people in relationships still have enormous struggles with their grandiosity. You need to form a conscious internal connection with what the Jungians call the archetypal Self as a center beyond the ego.5 This helps the ego begin to get down off its throne.

  We need more specific study of this. People are too vague about it. People are too vague about prayer, too vague about how to relativize the ego, too vague about how to establish and maintain the ego-Self axis. What are these things anyway? Can you tell me what they are? Are they just ideas? Or are they something real?

  Audience: Is it possible for people to find individual ways to challenge their own inflation? Is it always the consequence of a relational situation?

  Moore: I think it is possible for you to challenge it, and also important and necessary for you to challenge it. Let me give you an example out of my own life. I tend to get inflated in the warrior mode. Workaholism has always been my difficulty. I know that and I struggle with it. I use all sorts of things to help me deal with it, including more therapy and analysis than I care to remember. How much money I have paid trying to come down off that high chair! But it also helps to have a spouse who warns me before I take on one more workshop, one who asks me, “Don't you think you need to get some rest?”

  To summarize, there is a great dragon of grandiosity within us, and unconsciousness of that fact creates a very real enemy within. It is a real human war and a real Armageddon, not against other humans but against being swallowed by the great dragon of unconscious grandiosity. Our war is against the pathological infantile grandiosity that seeks to destroy the human species.

  Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” but psychoanalysis makes it possible for us to refine that. I would like to sit down and talk with Pogo about this. I would like to say, “Pogo, I don't think our true human selves are the enemy. Our grounded and human creaturely egos are not the enemy. The enemy is that unconscious grandiosity within us that constantly tries to persuade us to forget our limits and forget that we need help, to forget that we need others, or as the Native Americans are able to say, to forget that we are all related and all of one family.”

  The bad news is that every single person has this dragon within, but there is even worse news than that, in fact, news far worse than the Freudians want you to believe. If my fundamental metapsychology were Kohutian rather than Jungian, I might get into the fantasy of being healed of my grandiosity. You might hear me say that I could be healed if only I had the right analyst, or if only I had a long enough time, or perhaps if I could be analyzed by Heinz Kohut himself. I might have a fantasy of one of those analyses that the self psychologists write about where grandiosity is supposedly so transformed, transmuted, internalized, and built up into such a true human self, that for all practical purposes it is essentially gone. Of course, they do not really claim that all the grandiosity is gone. They would never make that statement, but they will say, “You have to relate to the grandiosity, and you have to transmute and internalize it,” sort of a domestication image. It is as if you had a wild bull, and you finally got him down to size so you could get him into the stable and go in and curry him, and so forth, images about getting him under control. Think of the Minotaur, the monster in Greek mythology. Getting the Minotaur into the barn would be a warm and fuzzy domestication image.

  Self psychology is fuzzy on this. They do not come out on this clearly because they still are not sure about it. What is this now? Do we get rid of our grandiosity or not? Do we transmute and internalize our grandiosity into the human ego, into the human self, the healthy human self? Is that what we do? In that respect, if you have enough analysis, can you reach a point where you will never again have any more problems with pathological grandiosity? They have a fantasy that such elimination of grandiosity is possible. They may not admit it or talk about it, but they do have that fantasy.

  A Jungian should never have that fantasy. A Jungian should know that there will always be a great Self inside that will never get completely transmuted and internalized. It is always in there, and here is the bad news, it will always press to take over. This is what explains why, after you work with someone for a while, they will say to you that they still have this problem. But what is it that they have? It is sheer fantasy to think that you can ever transform your grandiose energies so they will never seduce you again, that you can ever prevent your grandiosity from being seductive.

  Sometimes people think if they just prayed enough, or went to enough masses, then their grandiosity would stop being seductive. Or if they became a cardinal, or a bishop, or a mother superior, it would not be seductive anymore. The truth, of course, is just the opposite, because the more successful you get, the more seductive grandiosity gets. The more traumas and tragedies you have in your life, the more grandiosity will attack you. It can tell you how impressive it is that you are still alive, or it can chide you into depression by suggesting you might as well go ahead and commit suicide. Many suicidal thoughts come from a grandiose perfectionism.

  So Jung's point of view on this is much more vigilant than a Freudian perspective. You never get to the point where you are not vulnerable to the archetypal numinosity of the archetypal Self. Jung made this clear. He said, “Look, the Self is dangerous.” A lot of Jungians do not understand this. They think the archetypal Self is always friendly, trying to help. Where they get that I do not know, but they do not get it from Jung. The archetypal Self, if you are not awake, will eat you alive. Jung made it clear that you have to take a moral stand in the ego against the pressure of the archetypal Self. You must engage it and decide which of its promptings you are going to include in your ego, and which you are not. We do not talk about this enough.

  The spiritual traditions of discernment are enormously important, because you always have to listen to those voices you hear in your head and decide which ones are voices of demonic inflation trying to kill you or get you to kill someone else, and which ones are voices of the center trying to establish a just order in your psyche and the world. They are not the same voice. The voice of the true king and the true queen in the psyche is always a
blessing and loving voice, a voice that brings peace and power to the personality. Voices in your psyche that do not bring you peace, power, love, and joy come from demonic aspects of the archetypal psyche that hate you because you are not perfect, or because you are too perfect. Envy is directly related to all of this. Envy rolls right off of the grandiose Self.

  Audience: Yesterday you were talking about projecting a god or goddess complex on people.

  Moore: Men or women. You can project it on either or both.

  Audience: The way I understand it is that you project some expectations on someone that they cannot control, and one of them was not having limits. What would be some other basic ones?

  Moore: For example, when you fall in love with someone and do not have any understanding of these dynamics, it can become an overwhelming possession. I get people coming in and saying, “I just cannot live without this person. If they leave me, I will die.” It is as if you just met Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of fertility, or Isis, the goddess of the Egyptians, and you are mesmerized as one of her servants, and suddenly your autonomy and your initiative are gone, and your sense of self-worth is gone. You see this constantly in both sexes. This is an overwhelming idealizing projection of externalized grandiose energy, or god-energy.

  The elevation to the pedestal is a fascinating thing. I have spent much time in the last ten years studying sacral kingship and sacral queenship (see Perry 1966; Moore and Gillette 1991). When you put the king on the throne, you must totally control them. That is what the Kohutians speak of as a selfobject transference. That is to say, if I get into a selfobject transference with you, you must do exactly what I want you to do, and if you do something that I don't want, then I am enraged with you. The whole kingship thing, the dynamics between the king and the people, directly expresses that. Many kings were never allowed to come out of their huts. The people never saw the king at all. Even the king's royal red carpet had an unexpected purpose, to keep the king from ever touching the ground. Many of the sacred kings were also not allowed to see the sun. Why would that be? Why should the kings be kept out of the sun? Think about it. Exposure to sunlight could depotentiate the king. If the “Sun King” saw the actual sun, he might not feel like the Sun King anymore, because he would realize that he doesn't shine nearly as brightly as the real sun does. Once the self-esteem of the king drops, the crops won't grow, and the cows won't have their calves. Then what happens? They have to kill the king. If the king gets too depressed, you have to kill him. He must be replaced. Today we call this “traumatic de-idealization.”