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Moonchild: A Dream Analysis By Fra. O.L.L. | |
Page 3 
So this then is our dream for analysis. Let us begin with a few assumptions. First, all the characters, both male and female are Crowley or some aspect of him. This is the more true of those characters who are identifiable as real people who he was in relationship to. And we may understand that the real people probably experienced the effects of these projections during the course of their relationships with Crowley.Second, all the elements of the dream have meaning and may need to be explored in detail. (This is a detail, that luckily, we all lack the time for, however, I may bring in elements to support a hypothesis.) Third, the overall plot of the dream offers us a picture of the overall nature of psyche that is producing it. And this is where we will begin our work. The plot of the dream overall is about the birth of a baby. A very special baby, one who holds a soul that is of another order of existence entirely a "moonchild." However, this birth is what Hitchcock would call the McGuffin, it is what moves the plot forward but is actually only a device that builds tension. The real plot is the split between the Douglas and Cyril characters, each ruthless, each supremely talented, each unswervingly dedicated. So the only difference that we begin to understand as being between the two is that one is utterly evil and the other is utterly good. I would submit that these two factors describe the real nature of Crowley's psyche while writing this piece of literature. Remember that he describes himself as having an experience where the "incidents of life become harmonious unity." However, this may be the ego experience that hides the actual unconscious split that is going on. Let me suggest that this is a split from the darker side of the meaning of the Christ Center. Though I have never heard a Christian scholar say this, I'm going to suggest that it is not the incarnation of a being of another order (Son of God) into human form that makes a Christ. Rather it is what the individual does with that incarnation. And specifically to be the Christ, that individual must sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe. They must take the role of the scapegoat and die that all others may live. In this they prove the ultimate harmony and beauty of life by proving the unity of life and death. This is accomplished by redressing the cheat which death represents and reframing it as an extension of life. And it is the Kleinian healing of this penultimate split that this dream/book is about. To explain that statement I must digress for a moment into Kleinian theory. Klein suggests that as infants our only way to protect ourselves against the anxiety of our situation (i.e,. totally helpless and dependant) is to split off that anxiety and attempt to put it outside of ourselves. She calls this the paranoid/schizoid position. When we become anxious we find a thing that we can assign our anxiety to and then hate the thing. The thing we mostly find is our mother/caretaker. That is to say when we get hungry (which makes us feel anxious) we blame mom for it. But mom is also the one who feeds us and makes us feel good. So there must be two moms, the bad one that hates us and makes us get hungry or dirty or lonely, etc., and the good one who cares for us. We hate the bad one and we want to punish it. So we attack it when it comes late to our cribs and low and behold the good one will appear. But as we get older we begin to recognize that there is only one mother. When we have been attacking the bad mother -- biting her nipple and the like -- we have been attacking the good mother. Now we feel bad because we know that in attacking the bad mother we hurt the only mother who is the good mother. You will note that the bad and good are still split, the difference here is that we are taking the bad into ourselves. So now we are bad and the mother is good. At this point we attempt to make reparations to the mother, and Klein believes that this is where we first learn to love. But we are not all bad either and the mother demonstrates that to us. So now we have to accept that the mother is both good and bad and that we are both good and bad as well. In this we heal the split, but this whole phase is fairly hard and painful so Klein titled it the Depressive Position. However, out of the Depressive Position comes the aspect of the reality principle that human life does not consist of absolutes. So let us apply this notion to our topic. The book starts with the two characters Douglas and Grey split and hating each other. Douglas is all darkness, and Grey is all light. Grey takes on the project of begetting a child who will be a Christ or a Buddha. This child is to be a Moonchild. This choice of the moon is very symbolically important. The moon is a body of light that produces no light of its own, so that it is a joining of the light and the darkness. Further, the moon is associated with many forms of the goddess, or at the most primal level the moon is the birthing mother. It must also be noted that Crowley chooses Douglas, who is a thin veil for Mathers, as his image of ultimate human darkness. Now when the British Adepts of the G...D... would not initiate A.C. into the 5=6 degree, he went to Mathers to receive this initiation. So we are not stretching too far to say that Mathers had a certain fatherly role at that point in his life.
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