My very intuitive friend from Eire wrote to me, following the Florida horror:
I have been in a fierce silent tension in the greater field seemingly tied in with Florida shootings… Instinctually – I sense that there is something of the primal separation of humanity from Earth as living field – as true Mother in a greater sense. – a sense that it is at least potentially possible that the collective rage at the loss of connection to the Mother rose through him (the killer) as pure out-rage. Something is seeking to become clear here – whilst the world is clamouring for more control, so much more is being ignored.
I wrote back:
I quite agree with you about the connection between our separation from the mother and “out-rage”. I have had enough dream-visions of my own for that lesson to come home. I remember you and I talking about AE’s visions too, of the Red Swineherd (“son the the enraged mother”) being let loose on the world at the cusp of transformation. We are in it now, that rage. This rage is breaking through (Leonard Cohen: “you want the future, it is murder”). Unwitting individuals who cannot raise any of it to consciousness, just get swept away by the Swineherd, for a moment, until the carnage is over, and they are left as pitiable human beings again, wondering what the hell just happened, having to face the consequences of their actions. I was struck by this 19 year-old and other young men—how meek and passive they seem when it’s all over.
We have been psychologically separate from the mother since Adam and Eve, you might say (no separation, no consciousness) but it was only in the 19th C. that this separation became final with a complete disjunction (the Golden Chain of Being was shattered which enabled the Industrial revolution) so that ANY bit of nature became a resource only, no longer any felt hidden connection between us and nature or the Mother. This “freedom” from nature made us giddy with power and we have sought to become masters of nature. By and large we succeeded through the will but that utter separation is only in our style of consciousness. Our bodies remain, as ever, one with nature and this is the domain where we will see nature’s response to our power drives: RAGE! This rage is so often “aimed at” the innocent. This requires explanation. Why for example does not the enraged Mother get her servants to go down to the NRA offices or the politicians and murder them? Why are they kept safe and immune from this rage? Why the innocent?
My question, “why the innocent” was addressed today by a young survivor of the Florida massacre. She expressed how she is changed in the wake of the deadly shooting at her school, “my innocence, our innocence has been taken away from us!”
James Hillman has something to say about the cult of innocence in the USA: [1]
The American habit of not wanting to know about what’s unpleasant or simply being able to exclude from consciousness anything at all is to protect the American mind and keep it innocent. Innocence is the real root of our difficulty you know. [Many American novels explore American innocence, characters who don’t know anything and who are not just unsophisticated but whose virtue is their childlikeness]. Even as we grow old we have no mentors because they don’t have anything to teach anybody. They’re still as innocent as they were when they were 16. One of the statistics that will horrify anybody is that the largest group of men [in the sample] wanted to be between 16 and 20 [and] women wanted to be a little bit older, maybe 18 to 21. Now that is not denial. That’s a cult of innocence, staying in high school for your entire life. The cult of innocence really is the strength of America. It keeps this young country always on the go, always ready for change always out there getting new stuff and peer opinion is more important than any teacher’s opinion [etc]. It isn’t only a cult of youth, it’s the cult of innocence, not knowing: “Me? I don’t know how this happened; that’s not my bit. I don’t know.” That’s the big thing, “I don’t know and I don’t want to know I want to stay wilfully ignorant.”
We can turn to great art—art that discloses the truth our reality to us, for hints of deeper psychic movements that “cause” the events we experience on the surface of life, such as a school massacre, for example.[2] I remembered Picasso’s Minotauromachy, a painting that I have placed on my wall where I study every day.
You can see the bull man approaching, inducing panic in the village. The young girl in the centre is holding a candle up, along with an offering of flowers. A poised moment filled with enormous tension! It hints that the blind rage is attracted to, and, at the same time, fending off (the raised hand) this small light held by the girl. The darkness is drawn to an innocent light but at the same time may do unspeakable violence to it, plunging us all into the blackness.
Truly innocent children must literally bear the brunt of a rage-filled incursion from below, when an entire culture refuses to look, refuses to know, refuses to end its puerile state of “innocence”. Underneath these terrible tragedies in which children pay the price of this refusal, something is breaking through; in fact is seeking the light but an entire culture refuses to even look at what is coming. Refusing to look never stops anything that wants to approach us but it does take on more terrible forms as reflection of that refusal. The more we refuse the more terrible it must appear in order to break through and gain the light it seeks.
NB: today, Feb 18, County Sheriff recommends that the building in which the murders took place be destroyed asap! He thinks the students should not have to look at it. That is the cultish refusal to look, right there!
Also, a dramatic example of “refusal to look” (short video):
[1] 30 min ff. The cult of innocence is the American cultural practice of keeping adults in ignorance of reality. This is achieved by downgrading the truth of the imagination. This cult valorises entertainment (meaningless fantasy) above all else. I was repulsed for example, on the second day of media coverage, how the images of students streaming out of the school in terror were now choreographed to ominous music so that we can be entertained by the horror. Reality becomes drama! News programs routinely use footage of horrors, set to music, to market their best news anchors (read: circus ring masters)
[2] “Cause” in the sense of “give form to, an image of”, what would otherwise be inexplicable, random events with no meaning.
