The Moral Method

Kingston's Rockwood Asylum, 1920.

The Upper Canada Herald of July 18, 1831 reports on a visit to a mental asylum in Connecticut that claimed a high rate of cure: 

During our late visit to the United States, we had the satisfaction of examining ‘The CONNECTICUT RETREAT FOR THE INSANE,’ at Hartford. Having been politely favoured by a friend in New York with a letter of introduction to DOCTOR TODD, Physician to the institution, we were very kindly received by that philanthropic and intelligent gentleman, to whose skillful and humane treatment the inmates of the retreat owe a debt of lasting gratitude. The building, which is a neat specimen of modern architecture, is situated on a commanding eminence, overlooking the Town of Hartford, the beautiful Connecticut River, and the surrounding country to a great extent.

The ‘moral and intellectual treatment’ observed in the Retreat is thus explained in the annual report of the visiting committee: ‘The first business of the Physician, on the admission of a patient, is, to gain his entire confidence. With this view he is treated with the greatest kindness, however violent his conduct may be,—is allowed all the liberty which his cue admits of, and is made to understand, if he is still capable of reflection, that, so far from having arrived at a madhouse where he is to be confined, he has come to a peaceful residence, where all kindness and attention will be shown him, and where every means will be employed for the recovery of his health. In case coercion and confinement become necessary, it is impressed upon his mind, that this is not done for the purpose of punishment, but for his own safety, and that of his keepers. In no case is deception on the patient employed, or allowed,—on the contrary the greatest frankness, as well as kindness forms a part of the moral treatment. His case is explained to him, and he is made to understand, as far as possible, the reasons why the treatment to which he is subjected has become necessary. By this course of intellectual management, it has been found, as a matter of experience at our Institution, that patients who had always been raving when confined without being told the reason, and refractory, when commanded instead of being entreated, soon became peaceable and docile.’ The success of this treatment will appear from the fact, that of twenty-three cases admitted in one year, twenty-two recovered, affording the extraordinary proportion of 91 per cent.

This claimed cure rate is striking in comparison to what we see from the means we employ today: a cure rate of zero. Modern psychiatry holds that all mental illness is incurable, generally only gets worse over time, and can only be controlled with drugs.

Yet the claimed cure rate in Connecticut is confirmed by other sources.

“By 1837, Eli Todd at the Hartford Retreat had cured 91.3 percent of his recent cases, and Woodward at Worcester had discharged more than 82 percent as recovered.” (McGovern, C.M., The Masters of Madness: Social Origins of the American Psychiatric Profession. 1985, Hanover Press: University Press of New England).

These statistics have been challenged on the grounds that they do not account for readmissions—cures may only have been temporary. But the same accusation can be, and is, levelled against the claims for the current chemical treatments doing any good. Does the improvement in symptoms persist? This is a matter of some debate—long-term studies have rarely been done.

Why did we abandon this method for something manifestly worse?

The simple answer is that we did not abandon the method, consciously. The system required a high standard of behavior from staff, and power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the warden of a madhouse has absolute power over his charges. The system worked miracles within the first generation, so long as the founders were still in charge. Over time, it naturally degenerated into all the horrors of the “asylum” system we so recently have been trying to eliminate.

Kingston’s own Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane, the very memory of which is now largely suppressed, was probably built in imitation of the Connecticut model. Set in leafy, semi-rural grounds on the shores of Lake Ontario to produce the same pleasant, calming vistas as the Connecticut retreat.

But the essential element by then was lost. The “moral treatment,” as it was called, was based on religion; it was ultimately based on the model of Gheel, Belgium, and the shrine of St. Dymphna. The most successful early examples, in Britain and the US, were founded and run or at least inspired by the Quakers.

This is a model that could not be secularized. A first generation of administrators might still have been guided by some personal moral vision; but this was not institutionalized. Subsequent staff would have no particular moral motivations or religious training. They were in it for a living; or else for the opportunity to exercise power. The moral element of the moral treatment was gone, and all that was left was coercion and confinement. And warehouses full of growing numbers of patients without hope.

The fact that the approach has been called “the moral treatment” has led to an unfortunate misconception that patients were coerced and thought to be “immoral.” This is a kind of “black legend” that advocates of the medical model of mental illness have been able to use against it; from the beginning, the medical lobby opposed this “moral model."

The “moral treatment” means treating the patient as a moral being, competent to make their own choices—the very opposite of coercion. The core precept of the treatment, often repeated, was “Patients are normal, rational beings.” If they are suffering or acting strangely, they are reacting to some real problem they are facing. Removing them from their current environment, and putting them in a calm one, essentially solves the problem. “Patients are given structured, ordered, regular work and socialization in an attractive, family-like environment.”

It may take some time to calm down; and if they then return to the poisonous life situation they had been facing, problems may return. That was dealt with in the original Gheel model: recovered patients could choose to stay on and take up their life in the town.

It is the true madness that we do not return, as expeditiously as possible, to this moral model, the model of Gheel.

Do not suppose that this would be expensive. It would be vastly cheaper than our current approach. Psychiatric drugs for life are not free. And a recovered, fully-functioning citizen is a net financial gain to government and the taxpayer. Not to mention, the actual treatment involves productive work.

The method, to work long-term, must be religious in nature. Missing this was the mistake last time. Nevertheless, any supposed problem with the separation of church and state is easily overcome with goodwill: government funds need only be available without discrimination regardless of the particular denomination wanting to set up such a colony, as “faith-based charities” are now funded by government in the United States.

A Word on Fairies

Are fairies good Christians?

Many say they are not; that they are in fact shrunken pagan gods, still worshipped into later ages by the people living in more remote places, the “heathen” or “pagan.” This, after all, is where fairies are to be found: in the woods and dells, on the margins of human settlement. Max Muller, the great nineteenth century scholar of religions, promoted this opinion. W.B. Yeats cites “Irish antiquarians” maintaining that fairies are “The gods of pagan Ireland … who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.”

Superficially plausible; yet this fancy runs afoul of the fact that there are already such “little people” in pre-Christian lands, and they are not gods: the nymphs, naiads, and dryads of Greece; the yakshas, gandharvas and apsaras of India. Korea has its dokkaebi; the Philippines have their engkanto. The Quran, too, has its djinn, who function just like fairies in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Some djinn, at least, are good Muslims. 

Muslim fairies

But, writing in the early 17th century, the Anglican bishop of Oxford saw fairies as specifically Catholic:

By which we note, the fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Marias,
Their dances were procession.

But now, alas! They all are dead,
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

Most by now perhaps have left for Canada. My Irish-Canadian grandmother would agree. They were always hiding things in her kitchen.

Poet Yeats endorses this view, and notes that fairies remained a stronger tradition in Catholic Ireland than in Protestant England. Fairies perhaps earned their reputation as being pagan for the same reason many other aspects of Catholicism were declared pagan, in an England turned Puritan. Fairies, after all, loved beauty, and music, and dance.

Fairies do seem to find enduring accommodation in the Catholic imagination: fascinating such Catholic or “high church” authors as Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the church fathers, Origen seems to argue for their existence:

“We indeed … maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally,—that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams,—that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons. (Origen, Contra Celsus, Book 8, ch. 3).”

The simple, obvious conclusion is that “fairy” is a class of angel. This, indeed, follows from St. Augustine’s definition: “’Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit,’ from what they do, ‘angel.’’ The “fairy godmother,” the most familiar fairy in the tales, is functionally equivalent to a guardian angel. In some of Grimms’ collected fairy tales, like “The Maiden without Hands,” she is expressly an angel.

Why do our fairy tales not more often make this clear? Perhaps because angels are a bit too frightening to young and many adult minds. While, as Chesterton has observed, fairyland is resolutely moral at all times, it tends to follow Bishop Barron’s advice, and lead the uncertain in the proper path not with appeals to morality, but to beauty.

For there are also fallen angels. These are the trolls. A Danish legend implies their true identity:

One night as a priest was going from Hiorlunde to Rolskilde, he passed by a mound in which there were music, dancing and other merriment.

At this moment some trolls sprang forth from the mount, stopped the priest’s vehicle, and said, “Whither art thou going?”

“To Landemode,” answered the priest.

They then asked him whether he thought they could be saved; to which he replied that he could not then inform them. They then appointed him to meet them with an answer in a year.

In the meantime it went ill with the coachman, who the next time he passed by the mound was overturned and killed on the spot.

When the priest came again at the end of a year, they again asked him the same question, to which he answered, “No! You are all damned!”

Scarcely had he uttered the words before the whole mount was in a blaze.

“A fairy tale,” as Laura Cready says in her 1916 Study of Fairy Tales, “is a poetic presentation of a spiritual truth.”

The Sins of the Fathers

Orestes pursued by Erinyes.

“You shall no t make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me…”

Note this second part of the first or second commandment, depending on how you parse them. That makes it near the core of the Judeo-Christian message. It says that children and grandchildren are punished for a parent’s or grandparent’s sin.

Indeed, you get the same idea in the doctrine of original sin. Or that of redemptive suffering. One person can suffer for the sin of another.

And it is troubling: how can an all-loving God be so unjust? How can he punish Tom for Jerry’s sin?

Nevertheless, we have to accept that this is a fair description of reality. All of us either suffer or benefit from actions of our ancestors; these inform the circumstances of our birth and upbringing. Since God could intervene to prevent this, he is ultimately responsible.

But there must be more to this, too.

For this then is a case of God taking direct responsibility for human sin. Which is not theologically correct. We have free will.

And if a parent is morally depraved, it is probably not going to change their mind to hear that their children will suffer for it. That would trouble only a good person. In fact, this is what a narcissistic parent actually wants and tries to do. They inevitably choose one or more children as a scapegoat, and blame and punish them without cause. Most often, they are innocently punished for the very things of which the parent is guilty. That is what “scapegoat” means.

So it seems both false and fruitless for God to declare this commandment to the bad. And after all, if they are idolators—the specific sin which this commandment prohibits—they are not listening to God in the first place.

Nor to the already righteous parents, who care about their children. They are, after all, already righteous, and listening to God, not worshipping idols.

It has to be that he is speaking to someone else.

It has to be that he is speaking to the children. He is speaking to the grown children of the iniquities of their fathers.

Children, especially less thoughtful children, get their worldview and many of their unexamined opinions from their parents. Denominational beliefs, politics, and prejudices of all kinds run in families for generations. This is demonstrated often in demographic surveys, were it not self-evident. In our earliest years, our parents are the font of all knowledge; and this assumption never entirely fades.

Yet we all also have an innate conscience, from God, and must be conscious as well of contradictions, between this and what our parents taught us. And we all have a moral duty to actively seek the True and the Good.

It is perhaps vitally significant that this passage comes at the end of the prohibition against idolatry.

The essential and most dangerous idolatry may be this idolatry of the parent; and what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.”

The word translated here as “iniquity” is actually closest to the English “crookedness.” It is an image of a thing being bent.

That indeed makes it plausible that it refers to a distorted, dishonest world-view.

And it seems to bookend with Jesus’s condemnation in the New Testament of those who would “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” It is a condemnation of parents who fail in their children’s moral education.

One can see, then, how this commitment to sin is both passed down from the parent, and a matter of personal responsibility. We all have the moral obligation to see past such idolatries—this is what the commandment is telling us. If in an oddly oblique way, as if aware of the necessity at the same time not to upset the authority of the family—the foundation of all social order.

Happily, this conflict between God and parent is not great in most families. However, one can easily see in it the basis for original sin. Every human ancestor must, like Adam, fall somewhat short.

A similar concept of guilt running in families was known to the ancient Greeks. See, most obviously, the Oresteia trilogy: it ends in a formal trial, in which by the grace of Athena the parent is found at fault, and the child not guilty. Plato too speaks of ancestral curses for which a descendant must atone, through bouts of “divine madness” and through rituals of purification.

Plato is referring to melancholy, which is much of what we call mental illness; or at least to depression and mania (now “bipolar disorder”). In the Oresteia, the same experience is represented by pursuing Furies. This, depression, then seems to be a product of the dissonance between parental influence and eternal verities.

But those raised by a narcissistic parent who do not suffer through the ordeal remain in sin. They have broken the first commandment.

So What Is Depression?

Edvard Munch, Melancholy

So what is depression?

It is not an illness, so far as we know. All we really have is a set of symptoms. See the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to make this clear. It is a bulleted checklist. Check off five or more, and that’s your diagnosis.

And it may be an arbitrary list. What we call depression may, like fever, or a skin rash, have a variety of different underlying causes. Or it may be that one cause is behind both the symptom list we call “depression,” and another currently unassociated symptom list: “anxiety disorder,” or “narcissistic personality disorder,” or “autism,” or something else. Or all of them.

In fact, I submit that this is certainly the case. Depression can have a variety of causes, and it shares the same causes with other currently unrelated “mental illnesses.”

I think we can, however, talk about an essence of depression. It is not “sorrow.” The current label is misleading.

If you scan the official list of symptoms, it is not hard to guess. “Depressed mood.” “Diminished interest in activities.” “Loss of energy.” “Lack of movement.” “Indecisiveness.”

Bingo. The essence of depression is a lack of direction or meaning. One has lost one’s sense of purpose. One just can’t get that motor in gear. Or, one is in a kind of maze of thoughts, and cannot find the exit.

That tends to cause low spirits; not vice versa.

Cheering you up is not the issue, and is not going to work. You have to find direction.

You can actually see this happening to entire cultures. Jung observed it in Africa, and called it “loss of soul.” Back in the 19th century, when first contact with isolated cultures was still often recent, Darwin puzzled over it. He observed in The Descent of Man that when isolated cultures first encountered Europeans, they tended to stop marrying and having children. They stop working, whatever their work had been, and become deeply involved with alcohol or drugs. Their tightly integrated word view had been shattered by this intrusion of something vastly alien. They no longer understood the point of anything.

I have seen a similar reaction on a smaller scale among expatriates, on integrating with an unfamiliar culture. They retreat to their rooms, or to expat bars and alcohol. Some even begin to have fully delusional thoughts.

So the various symptoms we clump together as depression come from a feeling that nothing makes sense. We no longer know what to think.

Losing one’s sense of meaning can, in turn, have a variety of causes. It may be that some dramatic life experience, like going to war, or the arrival of aliens in some great ship, has challenged all our previous certainties, and we have found them not to be true. You can even get the effect from some sudden new idea, either something you learn or something you figure out for yourself. For a while, it can be deeply disorienting. This is one reason why, as Aristotle observed, learning is painful.

We generally derive a huge amount of our sense of meaning and purpose from our relationships: from family and social group, community and nation. We live for our lover, for our children, for our parents. We are prepared to die for our country.

So one inevitable major cause of depressive symptoms, probably the most common, is having come from a family in which one was rejected, devalued, unloved.

Psychiatry and psychology have been vaguely aware of this; but they see the critical factor as childhood abuse, usually physical or sexual. This is not the key; it is the devaluation of the person, or, conversely, the devaluation of the family or community relationship, however this is expressed.

This can explain another symptom labelled as depression in the DSM: a low sense of self-worth. You get this, most obviously, from living with others who tell you you are worthless.

But the same sorts of families or communities also tend to systematically lack or overturn more generally any sense of values. Parents with their own values in good order do not reject or abuse their children. This lack of values growing up may still be the most damaging thing.

If this is right, the cure is obvious. Pills aren’t going to do it. Pills can’t give you meaning. Many early psychiatrists themselves saw it, and said it: Frankl, Maslow, Jung. The solution for depression is to somehow find new meaning and direction.

Some find their new meaning and direction in psychology and psychotherapy. When it works, this is why it works. And this is why people today, who have been psychologized, tend to cling to their particular school with a fervor you would expect for religion.

But psychology and psychiatry are not very strong vessels for this. They are not intended for it, are new and untested, and are critically limited in scope.

The classical place to find meaning is, of course, religion.

The decline in organized religion in North America and Europe, not surprisingly, tracks exactly to a rise in depression and other psychiatric diagnoses. At the same time, people have tended to stop marrying and having children, they have become more inclined to retreat to drug use.

This is not a coincidence.

There Is a Right and Wrong

Somebody visited W.C. Fields in hospital, on his deathbed, and found him reading the Bible. They expressed surprise.

“Just looking for loopholes,” he explained.

And that is the story of much of human life, and much of human history. Everyone wants to be good, but without that difficult bit about doing good. Civilization itself may be seen as the struggle against that tendency, and civilizations have been successful to the extent that they have pulled it off: the ability to accept the difference between good and evil, and to act accordingly. Societies of any kind work to the exact extent that everyone follows the Golden Rule, to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The temptation is always very strong to simply deny that there is good and evil—that lets you completely off the hook. That is why you hear people using terms like “inappropriate” or “negative” for human deeds instead of “wrong” or “evil.” Modern psychiatry and psychology is founded on the premise. You read—as I just have—references to the “myth of pure evil,” claiming that most people who commit terrible acts, even mass murder, do so in the sincere conviction that they’re on the side of the angels. Perhaps they simply “lack empathy” because their brains are wired differently.

“I wanted to understand how ordinary people got caught up in doing these things,” the present author says. “I came to realize that those who come to do evil don’t view it as evil. Evil is in the mind of the perceiver. Most of the Nazis thought they were doing noble work.”

No. This reduces the human person to an automaton, without free will.

If there really were no such thing as evil, if it really were in the mind of the perceiver, all punishments for crime would be no more than the persecution of minority opinions. It would mean we had no right to judge the Nazis at Nuremberg, or to punish anyone at the International Court of Justice for personal peccadillos like mass murder. It never really mattered whether the Nazis won, or we did. Everyone died for nothing.

There is no way Himmler, for example, had a sincere conviction that he was on the side of the angels. Nor those below him. That was why they invented the gas chambers. They found it too troubling to see their victims shot. Better to do it all out of sight, so they could pretend to themselves it was not happening.

Everyone has a conscience. Demonstrably, when a narcissist does something morally wrong, he or she knows perfectly well they are doing something morally wrong. Because they will invariably lie about it. If they did not think it was wrong, they would not. And they have plenty of empathy as well: if they did not have a well-tuned sense of how others experience things, of how others feel, they would not be able to manipulate them so expertly, which they are famous for. Their “emotional intelligence” is through the roof.

Narcissism is like alcoholism. The alcoholic knows perfectly well that taking that next drink is bad for him, and for those around him. He does not lack a conscience. He just wants it; nothing else matters as much. Same with a narcissist.

This is also why not everyone who is raised to have maximum self-esteem, who is spoiled, will end up a narcissist. Everyone has a conscience, and in the end knows right from wrong in their heart. Becoming a narcissist requires a conscious moral choice.

The essential task for either the narcissist is to get back in touch with that natural rheostat or internal gyroscope, with conscience and with reality.

Psychology in general, sadly, takes exactly that solution, and puts it out of reach. By saying there is no reality, no morality, no right or wrong, and no free will. Trapping narcissists in their narcissism, and melancholics in their despair.

Once Abused, Always Abused

“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

There is an eternal and a crucial problem for the abused, recognized since antiquity. The problem is that anyone who has once been abused is from then on peculiarly vulnerable to falling under the control of another abuser. They have been preconditioned to it.

But what is the solution?

The common assumption is that you can prevent this by “going to a professional.”

But there is no reason why this should be so. In principle, professionals are just as likely to be abusers. This or another degree does not change that. In fact, abusive personalities tend to rise on the social totem pole, and so are probably more common in the professions.

A narcissist is going to be primarily interested in power and prestige. Being especially interested in these things, and bending all his or her efforts to achieve them, he is naturally more likely to get them. If you set out with a ticket for Milan, you are more likely to get to Milan, than if you set out for Rome.

Worse, the profession of psychiatrist or psychologist specifically has natural attractions for a narcissist. It gives you a constant fresh supply of vulnerable victims. So, more likely, going to a professional involves a greater risk of getting abused than going to the average anonymous Joe on Yonge Street, or to a self-help group. Or staying at home in bed.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: no other profession has stiffer protections in place to ensure the moral uprightness of its practitioners, or closer supervision by superiors, than the Catholic priesthood. Has this guaranteed against abuse?

Within self-help groups, there is also still a problem. The problem is that the symptoms of narcissism, which is to say, the typical abusive personality, are often similar to the symptoms of abuse. Both can appear as “depression” or “anxiety” as per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of North American psychiatrists. Current psychiatry cannot tell the difference, leading to disastrous mistreatments. Like giving anti-depressants to narcissists, with the effect of dulling the voice of conscience.

This is a problem for self-help groups as well: in any self-help group advertised as “for the depressed,” some participants are likely to be the abused, and some abusers. It is mixing the foxes with the hens.

Adult Children of Alcoholics, for example, ends up with two different “laundry lists” of matters needed to be attended to in one’s personality, and the two lists are reverse images of one another.

Big problem. A self-help or encounter group can thus easily become a bloody cockpit for bullying and abuse.

Here’s a proposed solution: narcissists fear the life of the mind. It could mean confronting their conscience. The abused crave the life of the mind: it is an escape from an abusive environment.

Accordingly, such encounter groups should concentrate on literary readings. They will be opaque, and seem irrelevant, to narcissists. They will likely get bored and leave. They will be entrancing, and meaningful, to true melancholics.

Improbable? Notice that it is exactly the strategy Jesus Christ used. That, he explains, is why he spoke in parables.

Donald Trump Is Not a Narcissist

A cartoon narcissist.

Everyone is saying Trump is a narcissist, and I think that is wrong. Trump only plays a narcissist on TV. To say that Trump is exhibiting “public narcissistic behaviour” is quite damaging, because it misleads everyone on what real narcissism is like. And it also, less importantly, misleads everyone on what Trump is about. 

Trump is an exaggerated, cartoon version of a narcissist. Like Jessica Rabbit. But a real narcissist would not be blatant and openly boastful like Trump is. A real narcissist is cunning above all. He will be full of charm in public, just the opposite of Trump’s evident boorishness. The devil is a gentleman.

A real narcissist is entirely concerned with manipulating people, controlling people, pushing people around, and at the same time having people say they are wonderful. Deviousness is key. Openly swaggering like Trump does is an obviously lousy way to manipulate people or get them to praise you. It gets their hackles and their defenses up. A real narcissist “love-bombs,” makes it all about the victim, until the fly is firmly in the web and he has gotten what he wants. Trump did exactly the opposite while campaigning. No true narcissist would do this. 

And a real narcissist wants everyone else to believe they are wonderful, and so usually wears a public mask of political correctness, benevolence, propriety, and social conformity. The abuse is behind closed doors, out of public view. Even Hitler, although not a typical narcissist, is an example of this—his speeches, as William L. Shirer observed, were always expertly tailored to say exactly what that particular audience wanted to hear. Then he did as he liked in secret camps in Poland. 

Trump does the opposite. He tries to be provocative. He seems, despite all the talk about his being “thin-skinned,” to be extraordinarily thick-skinned, saying as he likes almost heedless of what people will think of him or it. He speaks in ways he knows will provoke criticism in many quarters. It is as though he does not care what he looks like in a mirror.

He has also already established a pattern of at least trying to do what he said he would do when campaigning. This is the opposite, again, of a narcissist. A narcissist will promise whatever he thinks the hearer wants, and then do whatever he wants once the deal is made. Trump seems to have done at least as well as the average politician in keeping his promises—so far. You or I might not like his promises, but that is not the issue here.

Trump is also conspicuous for not seeming to hold grudges. Past opponents like Rick Perry, or Kim Jong Un, can be treated like best buddies a few months, or even a few days, later. This is the opposite of narcissistic behaviour. Granted, the subsequent friendliness might all be a sham, meant to manipulate. But narcissists hold grudges. It looks as though, to Trump, it is always “just business; nothing personal.” To a narcissist, everything is personal.

I don’t have any insight into Trump’s psychology, but I say he is not a narcissist. Primarily, I think he is an entertainer; a comic artist. I think of P.T. Barnum.

Barnum at work.

A Storm in Port

A case of hysteria is shown to medical students.

A “progressive Christian” article at Patheos opines on “What the Church Needs to Know about Mental Health.”

A few choice quotes from the article and my responses:

“As medical research continues and our knowledge expands, we are beginning to understand a little more of how our minds work.”

Exactly wrong. Empirical science, while useful for our understanding of the physical world, is of little or no value in understanding non-empirical things like the mind. It is like trying to hammer in a nail with a virtual spaghetti fork, or trying to calculate the number of translucent angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

The advent of “scientism,” science as a comprehensive cosmology and as a substitute for religion, has resulted in us understanding spiritual things less and less. Which means pretty precisely “how our minds work.”

It has probably in large portion caused the current growing epidemic of “mental illness.”

“Until surprisingly recently these same disorders would have resulted in institutionalisation”

Deinstitutionalisation is far worse than institutionalisation. It is far better to keep the mentally ill safe and warm in an asylum however seedy, or better, a well-lit sanatorium in some rural setting, with time and a lack of distractions to work out their problems, than to throw them out to freeze and starve to death on the pavements. This is a large part of the current epidemic of “homelessness”: the emptying out of the mental hospitals. It was and is really a cost-cutting measure by governments, masked as a humane move, and it is appallingly cruel.

“Medical science has identified a wide variety of mental disorders caused by a combination of genetic, biological, physiological and environmental factors, that cause people a great deal of suffering. As with other medical conditions these vary in severity and cause a range of different symptoms.”

There is almost no scientific support for the idea that mental disorders are genetic, biological, or physiological. This is a popular concept largely because it makes them seem more physical, and so more “scientific,” in the scientistic sense of the term. Scientism thinks only physical things are real. And it avoids moral issues. Lots of people prefer to avoid moral issues, usually for the obvious reason that they are aware of behaving immorally.

Literally speaking, medical science has never identified a single mental disorder, unless you count truly physiological conditions like epilepsy. All it has is lists of symptoms—that is what the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) is, and it is from this that psychiatrists work. Whether these relate to any underlying disease is purely hypothetical. Let alone whether a symptom relates to one disease or several or many happening to share the same symptoms, whether this is really a symptom of a disease or some spontaneous treatment for the disease, and what the mechanisms might be that cause the symptoms. Medical science does not know.

“The church has done a lot of damage to people by failing to recognise that mental health is a real thing, and that it needs to be taken as seriously as physical health.”

The church has always, until it yielded this turf to scientism, known what spiritual affliction (i.e., mental illness) was, and certainly understood it as a real thing. It is medicine that does not know, and that often tends not to believe that the mind (i.e., soul) and its concerns are real.

“Once identified, most mental health problems are entirely treatable.”

This is a fudge. “Treatable,” yes, in the sense that, say, a fever is treatable by aspirin, but virtually all of them are now incurable. It used to be largely taken for granted that those who suffered a spiritual affliction could in principle and often would get well. That is how, for example, confession works. And being “born again.”

Besides not themselves curing the condition, there is the issue that simply taking pills as painkillers can distract the patient from working through the problem, helping make it permanent. And then too, is drug addiction such a good thing?

I do not advocate avoiding “psychiatric medications.” Any port in a storm. But we can surely do better, and used to do better.

Death By Narcissism

Narcissus

Recently, I ran into this sad passage on Quora:

There are several Narcissists in my family. One person lived in denial to her dying day. ... When she became ill she lost all her power. She even denied she was sick for a while and because of that her cancer got worse. Once diagnosed as terminally ill she cried a lot and showed her anguish. She died in fear. She didn’t cope well in the end. It was sad.

This rang a big loud church bell in the back of my mind. My first wife was a narcissist. While we were together, she developed a lump in her left breast. For something like a year, I insisted she had to go to a doctor—free, in Canada—and get it checked. She wouldn’t do it. I could not understand it. It seemed suicidal. She said it was because she was afraid.

Finally, seeing no other option, I told her I would leave her if she didn’t go and get it looked at.

So she finally went.

It was cancer.

She died of it.

Had she gone sooner, she almost certainly would be alive today.

This reveals the nature of narcissism. It is a fixed habit of refusing to confront any unpleasant reality. It is based on fear. It is an addiction, like alcoholism. A typical alcoholic drinks so he can forget for a time some unpleasantness and disappointment he perceives in his daily life. But a narcissist relies on lies in the same way a lush relies on the bottle—and he lies to himself just as much as to others. He builds up an imaginary world, in which he is king, and tries to live in it. It is an addiction.

A narcissist will therefore deny anything they do not want to be true, to avoid facing it. This most obviously includes bad, immoral things they have done. At least, this is what will be most obvious to others, the victims. They will twist things and twist things in their mind until they can convince themselves it never really happened, it was not their fault, someone else did it. Probably their victim did it himself. This is useful to a narcissist in itself, because it gives him permanent carte blanche to do as he likes without regard to others.

But the lie is the real essence of the condition, and the lie will also and just as likely be about anything else that strikes the narcissist as unpleasant to face. A teen pregnancy; child molestation in the family; a business failure; any personal imperfection. Or a cancerous tumor. Anything they do not want to be true, they will convince themselves is not true.

This spreads immediately to their family, if they are a parent. Nobody else dares say what is going on. Because if anyone does, the narcissist becomes, in effect, hysterical, out of their fear of having to face what they have taken such infinite pains to avoid facing. They will become violently hostile to anyone who seems to shatter their carefully constructed delusions. My first wife, for example, once she learned she had cancer, switched immediately to blaming me for giving it to her. I suppose in her mind I gave it to her because I was the one who made her go to the doctor.

And so you get a dysfunctional family, all living a lie, pretending to lies of all kinds, and all walking on eggshells. Everything is a trigger or a tripwire. Adult Children of Alcoholics speak of “the elephant in the room,” but in most dysfunctional families, over time, there come to be many elephants in the room nobody is supposed to acknowledge.

Now, realizing how this works, I begin to wonder about my mother. She died of cancer too. I wonder if she was herself a martyr to narcissism. Not a narcissist herself, but a key member of a narcissistic, dysfunctional family, in which the denial of any unpleasant realities was standard procedure. The essential enabler.

I have been told that, when she went to see a doctor, the tumor was advanced. The doctor was surprised that she had not come earlier. Usually, he said, by that point the pain is great enough to suggest some urgent action.

Perhaps she did not dare say anything, or do anything, that might imply something as unpleasant as cancer. Perhaps not because she was herself so afraid of the cancer diagnosis, but because she knew the effect it would have on the family. It was an unpleasant reality. That would have been unacceptable.

Perhaps narcissism is the real cancer, and it is killing both bodies and souls around us every day. And making its sufferers, like the woman described in Quora, die in agony.

The Depressive and the Holy Grail

Through conquering the dragon, the hero typically acquires some magical object: the pearl of immortality, the Golden Fleece, the Golden Apples, Medusa’s head, Gilgamesh’s herb of immortality, the impenetrable hide of the Medean lion, the cornucopia; the Grail. Samson finds honey in the conquered lion’s carcass. Enkidu and Gilgamesh obtain sacred cedar logs. Perhaps not so special to us, but Enkidu on his death bed eulogizes them: “There is no wood like you in our land.”i Moses and the Israelites attain the Promised Land, prefigured by the burning bush and the tablets of the law.

Do these images all represent one thing? For what might they stand as “objective correlative”?

Being indestructible seems one most common theme. The Chinese cintamani around which the dragons dance is an elixir of immortality. So is Gilgamesh’s herb. Utnapishtim informs Gilgamesh,

“There is a plant that looks like a box-thorn, it has prickles like a dog-rose, and will prick one who plucks it. But if you can possess this plant, you’ll be again as you were in your youth.”ii

When Herakles rescues Hesione from the sea monster, similarly, his stated reward is two immortal horses. The skin of the Nemean lion, or the blood of Fafnir, promise invulnerability, surely a related concept.

Draper: The Golden Fleece

Many of the prize objects seem to be made of gold: the fleece, the apples of the Hesperides, Fafnir’s hoard, Beowulf’s dragon’s golden cup. The value everyone everywhere places on gold, in turn, has much to do with its being an incorruptible, an “immortal” metal, resistant to oxidization. Cedar, Enkidu’s and Gilgamesh’s first prize, is evergreen—it does not die back in winter—and, says Wikipedia, it is “exceptionally durable and immune to insect ravages.” Again, a possible image of permanence. Honey has the same salient characteristic: kept for centuries, it will not spoil. Moses’s burning bush “burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed”—an immortal fire.

As for the Holy Grail, it heals fatal wounds; similarly defying mortality.

Sir Percival and Sir Ector have just battled, and given each other mortal blows. They are then brought into the presence of the grail:

... and forthwithal they both were as whole of hide and limb as ever they were in their life-days: then they gave thankings to God with great mildness. O Jesu, said Sir Percivale, what may this mean, that we be thus healed, and right now we were at the point of dying?iii

The head of Medusa, conversely, is an invincible weapon: it brings instant death. But it is a particular kind of death, being turned to stone. This also implies permanence; like the stone tablets of the Mosaic law. Perseus says to Phineas, in exposing to him the gorgon’s head: “I shall make of you a lasting memorial; you will always be seen, standing in my father-in-law’s palace.”iv

Burne-Jones: The Garden of the Hesperides

In the Golden Apples, found hanging on a branch at the place where the sun sets; in the Golden Fleece, found hanging on a branch at the place the sun rises; and perhaps in Moses’s burning bush; we see hints of solar symbolism. The golden objects here, given their locations, seem cognate to the golden sun. Very often, indeed, to achieve his quest, the hero must go to the place where the sun rises or sets: Jason, Herakles, Gilgamesh, Perseus. The sun too is a common image of immortality: sol invictus, the unconquerable sun. It rises again every morning.

The goal of the hero quest, then, is apparently something permanent, something eternal. What is permanent or eternal? God, yes, and heaven; Plato’s ideal forms, if you are a Platonist; and those qualities both Plato and Aristotle called the transcendentals: notably, the moral good, truth, beauty.

The sun is an especially apt correlative for the transcendental: not just because it is immortal for all practical purposes, but because it is the primary source of light and vision. It is to light or to sight what a transcendental is to value, or a Platonic ideal is to a particular object. A thing is of value because it is true, or good, or beautiful. Gold is a comparable image: as coinage, it is accepted as a universal exchange, an abstract symbol of value.

The solution to Samson’s riddle suggests that here honey is also a superlative, and so a possible stand-in for ultimate value:

“What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?” (Judges 14:18)

Honey is thus, at least implicitly, the measure of all sweetness. And so it was, in a world before sugar.

Given that the abused or emotionally betrayed child is deprived by their family experience of any sense of personal worth or any sense of meaning in their life, this quest for absolute value may be necessary to gain some solid ground on which to stand and then to build. With no relative ground of being supplied to them by those around them, such as most of us have from our upbringing, they must find the ultimate ground of being or remain at sea.

A challenging, a heroic task; not everyone is called to be a knight errant. But having attained it, they have attained something not just of personal, but of universal value. They are able to bestow this blessing, this soul-wisdom, on others. That makes the hero.

Ovid describes Pythagoras as a hero in this sense:

Though the gods were far away, he visited their region of the sky, in his mind, and what nature denied to human vision he enjoyed with his inner eye. When he had considered every subject, through concentrated thought, he communicated it widely in public, teaching the silent crowds, who listened in wonder to his words, concerning the origin of the vast universe, and of the causes of things; and what the physical world is; what the gods are; where the snows arise; what the origin of lightning is; whether Jupiter, or the storm-winds, thunder from colliding clouds; what shakes the earth; by what laws the stars move; and whatever else is hidden.v

This all begins to sound mystical: the ultimate goal, after all, the perfect transcendental, must be God himself. Indeed, Sir Galahad, when he achieves the Grail, ascends to heaven:

And therewith he kneeled down to-fore the table and made his prayers, and then suddenly his soul departed to Jesu Christ, and a great multitude of angels bare his soul up to heaven, that the two fellows might well behold it. Also the two fellows saw come from heaven an hand, but they saw not the body. And then it came right to the Vessel, and took it and the spear, and so bare it up to heaven. Sithen was there never man so hardy to say that he had seen the Sangreal.vi

Knights of the Round Table

That may sound a little too ambitious for most of us. According to the legend, after all, a Galahad comes along only once a creation or so. More humbly, the typical depressive’s quest may achieve something like the second of Alcoholics Anonymous’s famous Twelve Steps: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” This more common grail may be an awareness that there really are transcendent values, and then some sense of what they are. The fundamentals of a religious faith.

On this rock, the depressive may build a life.

Significantly, when he achieves the grail, Sir Launcelot is healed of a “mental illness.” Now that he is lucid, Dame Elaine must explain matters to him:

Sir, said Dame Elaine, into this country ye came like a madman, clean out of your wit, and here have ye been kept as a fool.

Earlier:

These four men and these ladies laid hand on Sir Launcelot, and so they bare him into a tower, and so into a chamber where was the holy vessel of the Sangreal, and by force Sir Launcelot was laid by that holy vessel; and there came an holy man and unhilled that vessel, and so by miracle and by virtue of that holy vessel Sir Launcelot was healed and recovered.vii

Launcelot also has a dream in which the Grail is said specifically to heal an illness called “sorrow”: melancholy.

And so he fell asleep; and half waking and sleeping he saw come by him two palfreys all fair and white, the which bare a litter, therein lying a sick knight. ... All this Sir Launcelot saw and beheld, for he slept not verily; and he heard him say: O sweet Lord, when shall this sorrow leave me? and when shall the holy vessel come by me, wherethrough I shall be blessed? For I have endured thus long, for little trespass. A full great while complained the knight thus, and always Sir Launcelot heard it. With that Sir Launcelot saw the candlestick with the six tapers come before the cross, and he saw nobody that brought it. Also there came a table of silver, and the holy vessel of the Sangreal, which Launcelot had seen aforetime in King Pescheour’s house. And therewith the sick knight set him up, and held up both his hands, and said: Fair sweet Lord, which is here within this holy vessel; take heed unto me that I may be whole of this malady. And therewith on his hands and on his knees he went so nigh that he touched the holy vessel and kissed it, and anon he was whole; and then he said: Lord God, I thank thee, for I am healed of this sickness.viii

Rossetti: The Damsel of the Sangreal.

As for the Golden Fleece, note the story of its origin. It was the fleece of a golden ram (which later became the constellation Aries) sent by Nephele to save two children about to be sacrificed by their father.ix The ram saved them by carrying them off on its back. The fleece thus represents an aid for abused children; fit antidote for an abused childhood.

There is a similar reference in the legend of the Holy Grail. Once recognized, through his ability to sit on the Siege Perilous, as worthy of the grail quest, Sir Galahad is led to a tomb. 

Now, said the good man, go to the tomb and lift it up. So he did, and heard a great noise; and piteously he said, that all men might hear it: Sir Galahad, the servant of Jesu Christ, come thou not nigh me, for thou shalt make me go again there where I have been so long. But Galahad was nothing afraid, but lifted up the stone; and there came out so foul a smoke, and after he saw the foulest figure leap thereout that ever he saw in the likeness of a man; and then he blessed him and wist well it was a fiend. Then heard he a voice say Galahad, I see there environ about thee so many angels that my power may not dere thee. Right so Sir Galahad saw a body all armed lie in that tomb, and beside him a sword. Now, fair brother, said Galahad, let us remove this body, for it is not worthy to lie in this churchyard, for he was a false Christian man. And therewith they all departed and went to the abbey. And anon as he was unarmed a good man came and set him down by him and said: Sir, I shall tell you what betokeneth all that ye saw in the tomb; for that covered body betokeneth the duresse of the world, and the great sin that Our Lord found in the world. For there was such wretchedness that the father loved not the son, nor the son loved not the father; and that was one of the causes that Our Lord took flesh and blood of a clean maiden, for our sins were so great at that time that well-nigh all was wickedness. Truly, said Galahad, I believe you right well.x

The Grail exists, then—indeed, it seems perhaps Jesus himself came into world—to heal a lack of love between parent and child. That is the specific demon to be exorcised by the grail quest.

Every new discovery in science or in culture may also be understood as a hero quest for truth; every decisive moral act a hero quest for the good, “heroic virtue,” as is said of saints; every inspired creative act may be considered a hero quest for the beautiful. The depressive, driven to this quest by personal circumstances, may be expert in this questing business. Hence, perhaps, as Aristotle observes, the great philosophers, or poets, or artists, or military leaders or lawgivers, are almost always melancholics.



iThe Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 7.


ii Ibid. Tablet 11.


iii Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Book 11, Chapter 14.


iv Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, ll. 215-250, Innes, trans.


v Ibid., Book 15, ll. 31-108.


vi Morte d’Arthur, Chapter 22.


vii Ibid., Book 12 Ch. 5


viii Ibid., Ch. 18.


ix Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book 9, Chapter 34.




x Morte d’Arthur, Book x, Chapter 12.

The Helper

Siegfried at Regin's forge.

Joseph Campbell identifies, as a standard feature of hero legends, a guide or helper figure who appears near the outset of the hero’s quest to advise him or her.

For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.i 

In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld.ii

He cites Theseus’s Ariadne, Dante’s Beatrice, or Faust’s Gretchen.

This figure, says Campbell, represents “the benign, protecting power of destiny”; “all the forces of the unconscious,” “Mother Nature herself.”iii But these seem only awkward circumlocutions to avoid using the word “God.” Nature does not have a will or an intent, nor is there any “destiny,” without some divine will to make it so.

Very well; God is present in the hero quest. In the Samson legend, his birth is even announced by an angel, who designates him as a hero. In the story of Moses, Yahweh God himself is the helper figure.

Moses and the burning bush. Bouts the Elder.

But so what? Have we learned anything? After all, if God exists, everything comes from God, or if you prefer euphemisms, “destiny” or “Mother Nature.” And God is always with us, in principle; especially, proverbially, in times of trial. So why the need in these legends for a particular figure simply to assert God’s presence? It seems there must be more to it than this.

But first, is Campbell correct that a helper figure is a standard feature of these legends? Surely he is. Have we not already seen such helper figures?

Recall the aged priest St. Gerebernus who accompanies St, Dymphna when she flees her father King Damon; and the secondary, less commonly remarked, figure of the court fool.iv

We have seen as well that these two are remarkably similar to Lear’s two companions in his wanderings, the fool and Kent: the one an artist, that is, an actor, comedian, musician, and juggler; and the other apparently a religious figure, surprisingly monotheist in a pagan milieu.

There is also such a figure, easily missed, perhaps, in Hamlet; although there seems to be only one of the two: Yorick, who was a mentor to Hamlet in his youth.

“I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1)

Yorick is, yet again, a court jester. And he is a guide, surely, to Hamlet in his assumed role as feigned madman. “A whoreson mad fellow,” as one of the gravediggers describes him.

Young Hamlet with Yorick. 1868.

Interesting: three legends, three court jesters.

There seems to be no clear parallel of Father Gerebernus in Hamlet; no religious guide. The ghost of Hamlet’s father might seem to qualify; but it is unclear whether he is a helpful guide or a demon and the ultimate source of the problem. The latter seems more likely. What about Yorick, now dead and so having a solid connection with the spiritual world, serving both functions? He might because of this circumstance combine both figures. Hamlet does appeal to him for supernatural aid, as one might commend oneself to Saint Dymphna or Saint Gerebernus:
Now get you to my ladyʼs chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. (Act 5, Scene 1)

But so far this is all Shakespeare. Are there similar guides in the hero legends?

Indeed, we seem to find the same two figures in the world’s first known epic, the story of Gilgamesh. Assuming that Utnapishtim, the immortal old man who lives beyond the sea of death, is more the goal of the quest than a helper at the threshold, Gilgamesh comes upon two guides in seeking him: first Siduri, the “gentle girl who sits by the sea”; then Urshanabi, the ferryman who “rows the seas of death.”v Both give directions, help, and advice.

And Siduri is apparently an artist, just as are the court fools we find in Shakespeare. 

She crafted the first gold bowl
while peeking at the sun
through a slit across her face veil.

Urshanabi is a priestly figure, a psychopomp (guide of souls to the afterlife), the one who ferries souls across the sea of death. “He is one who plays with deadly snakes,” says Siduri. As Gerberinus serves as confessor for Dymphna, so Urshanabi scolds Gilgamesh for impiously breaking sacred columns and handling sacred stones.

We seem to find the same two in some of the Greek hero legends. Heroes are typically guided and aided by the twin figures Athena and Hermes. According to Apollodorus:

With Hermes and Athena as his guides Perseus sought out the daughters of Phorkys who told him where to find the Nymphai (Nymphs) who kept certain treasures of the gods‒winged sandals, the kibisis (a sack), and the helmet of Hades … He [Perseus] also received from Hermes a sickle made of adamant … [After his quest was complete:] Perseus gave the sandals, kibisis, and helmet back to Hermes, and the Gorgonʼs head to Athena. Hermes returned the aforementioned articles to the Nymphai.vi

Athene helps Perseus kill Medusa

When he completed his quest, according to Ovid, “he built three turf altars to three gods, the left to Mercurius [Hermes], the middle Joveʼs [Zeusʼ], the right the warrior queenʼs [Athenaʼs], and sacrificed a cow to Minerva [Athena], to the wing-foot god [Hermes] a calf and to the king of heaven [Zeus] a bull.”vii These three seem neatly to correspond to Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, and Siduri.

Athena is, like Siduri, an artist, patroness of the arts. Ovid in particular makes this plain, in describing a weaving contest between her and Arachne. The piece she weaves goes far beyond mere craft:

…. There, shades of purple, dyed in Tyrian bronze vessels, are woven into the cloth, and also lighter colours, shading off gradually. The threads that touch seem the same, but the extremes are distant, as when, often, after a rainstorm, the expanse of the sky, struck by the sunlight, is stained by a rainbow in one vast arch, in which a thousand separate colours shine, but the eye itself still cannot see the transitions. There, are inserted lasting threads of gold, and an ancient tale is spun in the web. 

Pallas Athene depicts the hill of Mars, and the court of the Aeropagus, in Cecrops’s Athens, and the old dispute between Neptune and herself, as to who had the right to the city and its name. There the twelve gods sit in great majesty, on their high thrones, with Jupiter in the middle. She weaves the gods with their familiar attributes. The image of Jupiter is a royal one. There she portrays the Ocean god, standing and striking the rough stone, with his long trident, and seawater flowing from the centre of the shattered rock, a token of his claim to the city. She gives herself a shield, a sharp pointed spear, and a helmet for her head, while the aegis protects her breast. She shows an olive-tree with pale trunk, thick with fruit, born from the earth at a blow from her spear, the gods marvelling: and Victory crowns the work. 

Then she adds four scenes of contest in the four corners, each with miniature figures, in their own clear colours, so that her rival might learn, from the examples quoted, what prize she might expect, for her outrageous daring. One corner shows Thracian Mount Rhodope and Mount Haemus, now icy peaks, once mortal beings who ascribed the names of the highest gods to themselves. A second corner shows the miserable fate of the queen of the Pygmies: how Juno, having overcome her in a contest, ordered her to become a crane and make war on her own people. Also she pictures Antigone, whom Queen Juno turned into a bird for having dared to compete with Jupiter’s great consort: neither her father Laomedon, nor her city Ilium were of any use to her, but taking wing as a white stork she applauds herself with clattering beak. The only corner left shows Cinyras, bereaved: and he is seen weeping as he clasps the stone steps of the temple that were once his daughters’ limbs. Minerva surrounded the outer edges with the olive wreaths of peace (this was the last part) and so ended her work with emblems of her own tree.viii

It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The weaving contest: Velasquez.

Hermes, in turn, is the Greek cognate to Urshanabi: Hermes Psychopompos, the figure who guides souls to the spirit world.

Both Hermes and Athena guide and help Herakles as well. In his quest for Cerberus, Hermes leads Herakles to the underworld. Athena guides him back. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia featured twelve metopes showing the twelve labours of Herakles. Athena is shown in four of them. She gave Herakles the noisemakers with which he startled the Stymphalian birds. She helped him support the sky when he sought the apples of the Hesperides. She intervened to end his killing spree during his madness.ix Both perform similar services for Odysseus.

Athena is divine patron of the arts, of military valour, and of wisdom. These fields do not obviously intersect. But interestingly, they are three fields Aristotle cited as typically populated by the melancholy: artists, heroes, and philosophers.x This may reveal Athena’s true interests and her true character.

In the Völsunga Saga, Siegfried/Sigurd again has two helpers and guides in overcoming the dragon Fafnir. The first is Regin, a smith, who “had all wisdom and deftness of hand. … he has the ability to work iron as well as silver and gold and he makes many beautiful and useful things”xi—an artist. Regin crafts Siegfried’s invincible sword, then gives him vital advice on how to proceed. The second helper is the god Odin, who appears as an old man to amend and complete Fafnir’s advice. Odin is cognate to the Greek Hermes. 

Then said Regin, “Make thee a hole, and sit down therein, and whenas the worm comes to the water, smite him into the heart, and so do him to death, and win thee great fame thereby.”
But Sigurd said, “What will betide me if I be before the blood of the worm?” 

Says Regin, “Of what avail to counsel thee if thou art still afeard of everything? Little art thou like thy kin in stoutness of heart.”
Then Sigurd rides right over the heath; but Regin gets him gone, sore afeard. 

But Sigurd fell to digging him a pit, and whiles he was at that work, there came to him an old man with a long beard [Odin], and asked what he wrought there, and he told him. 

Then answered the old man and said, “Thou doest after sorry counsel: rather dig thee many pits, and let the blood run therein; but sit thee down in one thereof, and so thrust the worm’s heart through.”xii

Siegfried is able to kill Fafnir, following this advice.

Siegfried kills Fafnir.

The artist figure gives his advice first, then retreats. The psychopomp figure next appears, with more complete knowledge. Just as with Siduri and Urshanabi.

This may be another reason why the Fool mysteriously disappears before the end of King Lear. His artistic vision only goes so far: it is Kent, the religious figure, who treads the complete path.

In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Launcelot’s grail quest begin when he is unjustly accused of infidelity by his wife Guinevere. The trauma drives him instantly insane. Again here, we see the common pre-modern understanding that madness comes from trauma, and specifically from an experience of emotional betrayal.

She [Guinevere] said: False traitor knight that thou art, look thou never abide in my court, and avoid my chamber, and not so hardy, thou false traitor knight that thou art, that ever thou come in my sight. Alas, said Sir Launcelot; and therewith he took such an heartly sorrow at her words that he fell down to the floor in a swoon. And therewithal Queen Guenever departed. And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so her an two year, and never man might have grace to know him.xiii

Now turn we unto Queen Guenever and to the fair Lady Elaine, that when Dame Elaine heard the queen so to rebuke Sir Launcelot, and also she saw how he swooned, and how he leaped out at a bay window, then she said unto Queen Guenever: Madam, ye are greatly to blame for Sir Launcelot, for now have ye lost him, for I saw and heard by his countenance that he is mad for ever. … Alas, madam, ye do great sin, and to yourself great dishonour, for yehave a lord of your own, and therefore it is your part to love him.xiv

After two years of wandering, Sir Launcelot, still mad, happens upon a tree in which are hanging two swords and two shields. “Upon a tree, there hung a white shield, and two swords hung thereby, and two spears leaned there by a tree.”

What can it mean?

Launcelot takes one of the swords, and with it strikes one of the shields, making a loud noise. A dwarf appears and wrestles him for the sword. Then a knight all in red appears, and fights him for it.

Once Launcelot falls, however, they prove themselves helpers, not enemies. The dwarf says to the knight, 

Sir, …, it is not worship to hurt him, for he is a man out of his wit; and doubt ye not he hath been a man of great worship, and for some heartly sorrow that he hath taken, he is fallen mad; and me beseemeth, said the dwarf, he resembleth much unto Sir Launcelot.

The knight responds:

…Whatsomever he be, said that knight, harm will I none do him.xv

So they put him on a litter, take him to the knight’s castle, and nurse him back to health. He slowly recovers, and eventually rises to do battle with a great boar. The boar can no doubt be taken as a guardian figure; the hero quest has begun. Here as elsewhere, the hero quest is presented as the proper and healthful response to the experience of mental illness generally. Launcelot goes on from this to eventually find the grail.

So, have we met our two helper figures? Two swords, two shields, two helper figures, the dwarf and the red knight?

Not so fast. Launcelot, after all, struck only one of the shields with only one of the swords; he was, then, summoning only one of the helpers. There is an implication here of more to come. And more comes. In vanquishing the boar, he receives terrible wounds, and again passes out. He is found by a holy hermit, who again nurses him back to health.

And here, surely, we have our Gerberinus, our religious figure.

This suggests that the red knight and the dwarf, who respond to the first shield, are collectively the artist figure, aka the court jester. Not an obvious connection to make, perhaps; but dwarves were often employed as court jesters. Once healed by the hermit, Launcelot stumbles into a city and is adopted, being still somewhat mad, as a court jester by the local king. As the sign of his office, he is invested with a red cloak.
And then Sir Castor sent for the fool–that was Sir Launcelot. And when he was come afore Sir Castor, he gave Sir Launcelot a robe of scarlet and all that longed unto him.

This seems to retroactively identify the red knight—as a court jester.

Athena helps Herakles

Here too, as elsewhere, the artist appears first, the dwarf and red knight, then the psychopomp, the hermit, takes over.

For Jason and the Argonauts, there is an obvious helper figure in Phineus; a prophet, someone with spiritual second sight: “Phineus who above all men endured most bitter woes because of the gift of prophecy which Letoʼs son had granted him aforetime.”xvi Phineas gives the Argonauts detailed directions to Colchis and the Golden Fleece, outlining the dangers they will face on the way, and how to overcome them. He is their guide, then, for the entire trip.

There is nothing here to clearly identify Phineas as an artistic type; except that he is not on good terms with the gods, having revealed too many of their secrets to mankind. That sounds more like the rebellious artist than the priest. Like Siduri, the primordial artist in the Gilgamesh tale, he lives on the shore of the sea; he does not cross over. He does not go with the Argonauts on their journey, but describes their destination from afar. He paints the picture, as it were.

And there is here a second guide and helper: Medea. She is, explicitly, a priestess, a priestess of Hecate. Her advice and help is vital once Jason has reached the far side of that great sea, the other side.

Tiresias: Fuseli

If we then consider Oedipus Rex, we find a figure very similar to Phineas there, an old man with second sight, who guides Oedipus on his quest—in this case, unhappily. It is Tiresias, the all-purpose prophet of Greek legend. Also like Phineus, he is blind—blind, that is, to the physical world, the better to see without distraction the invisible spiritual world.

And in the Oedipus cycle, again, there is a second helper figure: Antigone. She is not formally a priestess, but, like Kent, she is conspicuous for her religious sentiments. When her brother Polynices dies, she violates the law to mourn for him, arguing that the divine law supercedes human law. “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living,” she explains to her sister. “In that world I shall abide for ever.”xvii To her, it seems, the spirit world is the real world. She ministers to her brother, and then also to her father, Oedipus.

So why are these helper figures here? Because, surely, they indicate the two reliable aids and supports for the abused and the depressed: the two great spiritual disciplines, the two great guides for the perplexed: religion and art. Modern psychiatry and psychology are not included, of course. They did not yet exist. Should they be? Have they offered anything better?

The Gilgamesh epic calls Siduri, the archetypal artist, “The girl who gives men lifesaving drinks”; “whose drinks refresh the soul.”xviii That, surely, aptly describes the proper effect of art. She warns Gilgamesh that, in undertaking the hero quest, he is “staring at the sun.” An interesting image; particularly since the epic has at this point just described Siduri, the artist, as one who has “peeked at the sun” in order to fashion her golden bowls. Artists, then, are those who have seen the transcendent, and reflect or reveal it in their work. They live on the shore of the eternal sea; and so are authorities for those of us who undertake hero quests. Every work of art is a glimpse of eternity.

Ushanabi, the religious figure, on the other hand, has actually himself crossed over to the other side of that sea. In principle, he is the greater and the later guide.

Here we plainly have suggestions for the treatment of depression.


iCampbell, op. cit., p. 69.

ii Ibid., p. 72.

iiiIbid.

ivone account that includes the court jester is given at http://people.wku.edu/sally.kuhlenschmidt/whimsy/dymphna.htm

vEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10, Kenneth Sublett, trans.

viApollodorus, Library, 2. 37 & 46, Aldrich, trans.

viiOvid, Metamorphoses Book 4, ll. 740 ff Melville, trans.

viiiIbid., Book 4, ll. 70-102 Kline trans.

ixhttps://www.thoughtco.com/the-goddess-athena-helps-hercules-117193

x“Through what is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics (μελαγχολικοι)?” “Many other heroes seem to have been similarly afflicted, and among men of recent times Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, and numerous other well-known men, and also most of the poets.” Problem XXX.

xiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 14, William Morris trans.

xiiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 18.

xiiiMalory, Morte d’Arthur, Book 11, Ch. 8.

xivIbid., Ch. 9.

xvIbid.

xviApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 2. 179 - 434 RC Seaton trans.

xviiSophocles, Antigone.

xviiiEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10.