King Arthur and the mythopoesis of swine flu

I have spent the afternoon lying in bed with swine flu watching King Arthur: Legend of the sword from 2017 and comparing the film’s mythopoetic depiction of psychic maturation with the psychology advocated by managed health and PMB forms. Also thinking that we could do worse than picking the next president by the method proposed in the Arthur legend.

Arthur flings the sword and the power it offers into the water. He wants to reject the violence and the havoc it creates for the people he loves, and he wants to refuse the internal confrontation with the trauma of his witnessing his father’s murder at his uncle’s hand that has accompanied its appearance in his life. The lady of the lake returns it to him as he lies exhausted in the mud having run as far as he can from where he tossed the sword and shows him what will happen to his country if he does not do what he must. He plucks up his courage and picks up the sword and must immediately deal with the flashbacks to his father’s death.

The villainous uncle killed Luther Pendragon out of jealousy of his power rather than face what this feeling meant for him and then casts first his wife and then his daughter into the lake in the depths of his tower’s dungeon. The lady of his lake tells him that the cost of the power his jealousy craves is the murder of someone he loves. Such is the doomed pact every one of us can make with our own unconscious.

Jealousy is an aspirational emotion. It is the compass needle that points us in the direction of what we feel we lack, a signpost and a prompt towards dealing with a lack of something in ourselves. In the exterior world it urges us to take action to obtain something to fill this perceived inadequacy. In this case power.  His pursuit of power is necessitated by the refusal to face himself and requires giving up all love and compassion. If we are oriented to the interior, jealousy is correctly reinterpreted as an invitation to experience our incompleteness and cultivate acceptance of our inadequate state which paradoxically makes us more whole.

Arthur’s path of compassion and rejection of power for power’s sake, leads to him coming into the fullness of his birthright, a leadership based on a round table (a symbol of wholeness, connection, individuation, egalitarianism) while his uncle is an authoritarian leader who inspires fear and stands on a pedestal before terrified masses who chant his name.

Although our leaders seem routinely to award their spouses and children lucrative tenders rather than sacrifice them to wicked water faeries, the allegorical parallel is the 40% of kids who are malnourished and the 81 percent of Mid primary school babies who can’t read and the repeated instances of inhumane treatment of the vulnerable in our society.

Jung said that what we don’t confront internally will be lived out externally and experienced as fate. I have wondered how so many of our leaders, once willing to die for a just cause, are now in old age, so cowardly and shamelessly without compassion for the pain they are creating. I wonder about the role of trauma here – the deep ancestral injury inflicted on them, trauma they inflicted on others in a bitter war, and the desperate striving for power and concomitant murder of love that avoiding the internal struggle requires.

Jung’s suggestion for recovery would be for each of us go inward. He would see external warfare and strife as the living out of internal pain and the refusal to deal with that internally. And that pain might not be related to our socio-political history although inevitably and at the highest level of analysis it will be.

All stories of absent fathers and abuses of power (Luke Skywalker, Arthur, Jesus Christ, Jacob Zuma as examples) are embedded in larger political narrative but the most potently informed action for the higher good comes through deep personal work, exploration, trial and inevitable sacrifice. As Jung also points out, this is not a popular option, because it’s hard, and because our culture provides few avenues to the interior world. Our mirrors are all too often too literal and reflect our outward facing selves, both physically and psychologically. It is also most particularly unattractive when the exterior world offers a Mephistophelean pact involving an all-expenses tour of the high life accompanied by a blue light brigade or the equally tempting option of pointing a finger at this procession of state funded Gucci, Armani and KFC and remaining paralysed by disgust and fear of the future while sheltering behind a shield of self-righteous “I told you so”.

Anyway, I liked the movie – nice B grade schlock well executed and our wounded and possibly terminally ill culture’s attempt to keep alive ancient stories in however a diluted form. Which is important because we have extremely poor memories, and our stock of good stories is currently obscured by a pile of excrement that makes the “penny dreadfuls” of my grandparent’s era look like Chekov.

I could have done without the narcissistic sheen that coats most Hollywood movies that, like the sugar in our food, dominates the senses but it was a useful piece of exteriority to flee to in avoidance of these swine fever dreams.