Madness

Madness is a theme I was forced to look at due to mental health problems in my teens and early twenties.  Although I wanted to run away from it, it continued to haunt me. I never wanted to be one of those crazy people who lost touch with reality or lost control of my life,  and I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me. But the fear remained somewhere within me even though on the outside I mostly looked fine.

Art by Andre Koekemoer

When we see something outside of ourselves as broken, quite often we’re projecting something we don’t want to look at within ourselves. This was definitely the case for me and, dare I say it, possibly within society as a whole. To be clear, I don’t think mental health problems and the idea of madness necessarily belong together, but in my case, mental health issues forced me to look at my fears and explore what madness meant to me.

Years of therapy coupled with studies of ancient healing practices led me to discover that there is a world of energy beyond physicality. Discover is maybe the wrong term – I think it had always been part of my awareness, but I lived in a culture where the invisible realms were located firmly within the confines of religion. The psyche is connected to the physical body in ways we probably don’t fully understand. The idea that mental illness can be ascribed to an imbalance in brain chemicals formed a large part of the story I was told originally, but I don’t think it’s that simple. My mental health symptoms called me to explore the depths of my psyche and dive into the invisible world of energy where archetypes live. Here I had to transform the destructive forces into something beneficial. I use the word force deliberately, because the psyche can be immensely powerful, be it in a harmful or a healing capacity. Although these energies are not physical, we can see their effects in the physical world. When we experience intense emotion and the effect it has on our lives and actions, there is no denying that it is real, even though we can’t see it or touch it.

Facing my fear of madness led me to understand and better relate to the world of energy. In a sense, madness is crossing the bridge between the physical and the non-physical realms through the imagination. We can get swept away by the dark currents or learn to tap into the depths of the psyche for creativity and healing – there is sometimes a fine line, and it can even be both. Moving outside of the boundaries of the defined world can bring about creative or intellectual genius. Those who dare to dream or embrace new ideas ultimately lead the way, even though many have been told they’re crazy or stupid. But all of our man-made reality started as a thought or a dream before it took form in the material world.

I don’t think the invisible is solely the domain of the dreamers, geniuses and those who are mad. I think madness is an aspect of the self through which we create meaning and experience life. I don’t know too many people who would admit to having strange dreams or experiences that defy reality, but I think most of us have experienced the madness of love, which can be beautiful, intense and soul-destroying. Religious thinking lies at the dawn of human civilisation[1] and I consider this also a kind of madness. The world is simply too mysterious to know everything or even anything and to make sense of life we have to find a way of relating to the powers of creation that are beyond our understanding.

An important question to ask is perhaps who decides what kind of madness is acceptable or even beneficial and what kind makes someone an outcast. I remember a fable about madness I read in one of Paulo Coelho’s books, Veronika decides to die. It was about a place where people lived happily under a just king, but an evil magician wanted to destroy them. He poisoned all the wells so those who drank the water would become mad, but he didn’t manage to poison the king’s own water. The king found it impossible to lead with reason when his subjects were mad, and he asked his wife for advice. She suggested they should drink some of the poisoned water too if they couldn’t convert the people to sanity, and that solved the conflict.

History has shown that people can accept injustice or even commit atrocities when in the grip of collective hysteria. In the real world of the present, mental illness is more or less defined as a clinically significant behaviour or condition that is considered abnormal within a person’s culture and it causes severe distress.[2] If there had been a psychiatrist in the story of the poisoned water, he may have diagnosed the king with mental illness, but the reader would have known the truth.

I don’t think we can ever get away from madness, and I think we need it for personal growth. When confronted with it, we have some important choices to make. On an individual level, we may need to face our demons or listen to our soul’s calling. When at odds with the world, we can either allow collective madness to steer us away from our internal compass or we can stand strong in our truth and live accordingly. Metaphorically speaking, if a dark magician poisoned the water, we would have the option of drinking of it too just because it would be easier to get by in the world. But the better alternative may be to call in the good kind of madness and imagine a better world based on justice and love.

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[1] I highly recommend Supernatural by Graham Hancock for an in depth analysis of this topic.

[2] This is my concise version of the more elaborate technical definition from the DSM and reflects my understanding of what I learned when I studied psychology in 2007. I did an internet search when writing this article and found there is much debate around the concept.

Reflections on Myths and Abuse of Power

My studies of mythology strangely originated in my teenage ambitions to be a lawyer. I chose Latin as a subject on the recommendation of the lawyers in my family. I fell in love with Latin literature, which I continued studying even when law turned out not to be the right choice for me. I also studied psychology, which complimented Latin literature in an unexpected way: through learning about the work of psychoanalysts such as Carl Jung, the myths I studied gained new meaning.

I became interested in the symbolism of gold in myths after I wrote my first novel, which can be described as a creative experiment guided by my subconscious. Gold is a symbolic theme in my novel and it also features in the title, In Search of the Golden City. When I resumed my studies of mythology after a hiatus of about five years, the mythical golden age which originated in some of the oldest Greek literature was the natural choice for a research topic. The author whose work I focused on was Ovid, a Roman poet from the first century B.C. whose work is well known for its wit, ambivalence, and political commentary. Even though I had never had much interest in the political side of history, I couldn’t avoid looking at it, because the myth of the golden age had become a political myth in the time of Augustus - the emperor was said to usher in a new golden age. My favourite poet poked fun at those in power by comparing them to angry gods who took advantage of defenseless humans.

Mythology remains a somewhat mysterious subject. Many think a myth is simply an untrue story, a concoction made up by ancient people who did not have science to explain the world. I don’t think myths are untrue in any way, provided they are not taken literally. To me, they reveal some truth about what it means to be human, coloured by the culture of its origins. Joseph Campbell, a mythologist whose work I respect very much, said that the inner landscape of humanity has not changed much in several thousands of years, even though our outside reality barely resembles the world humans lived in a few millennia ago. When I studied the Golden Age and its connections with political power through the words of Ovid, I learned something which I think is still relevant today. Personal power is an important theme to me because of its importance in healing. Much as I would like to separate it from politics, simply because I have no interest, it is impossible to do so.

The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder

The myth of the golden age is possibly even older than the oldest known Greek literature and describes a fall from grace, much like the story of Eden. It first appeared in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which dates from about seven centuries B.C. Hesiod describes a progression from the golden age to silver, bronze and finally the iron age, which he laments having to live in because of all the injustice in the world. Interestingly, the myth of Pandora also features in this work as an alternative explanation for all the evils in the world. Although on the surface it may appear that women are made the scapegoat, I think it is a metaphor for that which we desire but cannot control. Perhaps it even points to the division between genders, which I think is more of a fragmentation within the individual and collective psyche than a battle between the sexes.

Aratus was the next Greek poet to describe the myth in his Phaenomena, which dates from about the third century B.C. Phaenomena means “things that appear” and the work describes the constellations and how they came to be there, of course in mythical rather than scientific terms. Aratus connects the golden age with the constellation Virgo. The maiden is associated with justice and the golden age is described as an era when she still lived on earth and mingled with humankind. When the fall from gold to silver happened, she gradually withdrew from human affairs, until the race of bronze drove her to take abode in the sky, unable to cope with their wicked ways.

In Ovid’s version of the golden age in the Metamorphoses, the movement from gold to silver, bronze and then iron follows a similar trajectory. Two things stand out in his version of events. The first is that the iron age coincided with the discovery of gold in the material sense, reminding that desires if left unchecked can bring out the less desirable qualities in us, much like the Pandora myth. The second is that although it was ruled over by Saturn, there is no mention of the gods in the text at all until the fall is near. After this section of the work, the gods take centre stage, constantly ravishing helpless humans and interfering in their affairs.

I won’t go into all the details of the myth and the Metamorphoses, which is literally a work of epic proportions. My conclusion, however, was that there was a connection between the fall from grace and the rise of power in the imperial sense of the word. As soon as men started striving for dominion over the earth, they became the subjects of angry gods, or the political figures favoured by them. From a philosophical perspective, one could ponder about the meaning of the golden age and whether it truly meant the absence of all ills. What is striking to me, however, is the division between divinity and humanity associated with a fallen state.

Another course in my degree programme was agricultural slavery in the ancient world. We also looked at modern slavery, which was only finally abolished a few centuries ago, merely a fraction of time in the known history of humanity. Much as this was an unpleasant topic, I think it is important to look at one’s shadow to progress in any meaningful way, and the history of my species is part of what I need to look at within myself. One of the most hailed philosophers of the Western world, Aristotle, waxed lyrical about the existence of natural slaves. The Latin word for slave is servus and it is derived from the verb servare, which means to save. Slaves were those who had been spared from being killed when they lost a war. It is strange how even in those days domination of another human being was justified, even by intellectuals.

Closer to home, I lived in apartheid South Africa for the first ten years of my life. I now live in Scotland, and nearly three decades later I’m pretty sure most people I speak to would consider apartheid one of the most abominable institutions in recent history. But having lived with it, albeit not too long, I know that it was simply how things were. There were white people who questioned it, but I think most did not, or they did not want to share their views too loudly, or they felt powerless to change anything. I’m simply speculating because I was a child, and I can’t remember everything. But I do know that the Bible was used to justify apartheid, and few would dare to question God. Furthermore, questionable psychometric tests posing as science was used on black people to “prove” inferiority and thereby justify policies of unequal education. Of course, these studies were later discredited. When the regime ended, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to help heal the wounds of the past. Many good-hearted white people were shocked and horrified by everything that emerged – they could not believe what the government had been up to.

If there has ever been an era in human history where abuse of power did not occur, I would like to know about it – it seems as old as humanity itself. I find it surprising that we still hesitate to question those in positions of power, or even other forms of authority posing as people with lots of knowledge. I don’t intend to dismiss the expertise of those who are very knowledgeable in a given area, but I do think that there is always more than one way of looking at something. I find it somewhat ironic that after millennia of wars that probably did not need to be fought, human rights abuses that only benefited those in power and social inequality that seems completely senseless, few people have considered their own role in defining the collective reality.

This is where I make the connection between personal power, which is so important in healing, and external power. I don’t think it’s completely accurate to assume that we live in a world where we are subject to laws and power structures decided by others. I think we are the reality, and each person contributes to it, whether they do so consciously or not. No leader or government structure, corrupt or otherwise, could ever wield power unless it is backed up by the beliefs of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. No abuse of power could ever happen if it wasn’t fuelled by the actions (or lack thereof) of subjects.

In Ovid’s version of the golden age myth, the absence of laws was an indication of the presence of justice. I think that gives us a clue on how we can find our way back home if we feel oppressed. If we claim full responsibility for our consciousness and live by our internally guided truth, there is no more externalisation of power. Each choice we have can be a powerful one and an expression of who we are, and we are free to revise it and do better next time if we miss the mark. When external forces attempt to impose their will on us, we can see it as an opportunity to claim our sovereignty. I’m not suggesting we will all suddenly be enlightened and the world’s problems will disappear, but I think it’s a good place to start.

The question remains of what exactly is the golden age, and to me the beauty of myth is that we can interpret it in a way that we find meaningful. The common theme between the various versions of the golden age myth and Eden is the presence of divinity among humanity. There is reference to abundance in Aratus’s treatment of the myth, and the garden of Eden to me suggests harmony with nature and an interconnection between all living things. Perhaps the topic is too deep to fully capture through something as mundane as words. I don’t want to discount the idea of a true paradise on earth, but I think it could be as simple as knowing we are connected to the source of all life and the universe is in us as much as it is around us. Perhaps from that place of knowing, power over another seems absurd, because we are not separate from them. When we let go of relying on a saviour and the fear of death no longer haunts us, perhaps we can begin to explore the true power of love.