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Moonchild: A Dream Analysis By Fra. O.L.L. | |
Page 4 
Now we have mom and dad represented. Another character that must be brought in is the soul figure. We are told by Jung that it is the task of the soul to provide the actual mothering through the process of early individuation, or what Klein call the transition from the paranoid - schizoid to the depressive position. In this case, enter Lisa la Giuffria. She is a shallow and narcissistic creature who is easily distracted by shiny things. However, she also will grow by this exchange. Beyond this we require the figure who holds the archetype of wholeness. Call it the god image, and that is supplied by Simon Iff early in the story and by Mahathera Phang in the final image. The first god image as seen in Iff is someone who can simply absorb evil by accepting and loving it and letting it become one with him and remain unaffected, as he does with the "thing in the garden" when he and Lisa first meet in Paris. In Mahathera Phang, we have a sense of accepting the pain and loss of our own evil with joy rather than detachment. However, we get ahead of ourselves here.So we are beginning from the understanding that these and in fact every character in this self-state dream - novel are representative of either the dreamer or the dreamer's perceptions of the world. In this context we are aware of the great split in Crowley's personality between that which is most depraved, cowardly and dangerous and that which is noble, driven, and dangerous. In the plot of the novel we see Crowley attempt to hold these to figures in opposition. This is the tension of the opposites, which is crucial to a Jungian analysis. For it is out of this tension that the unconscious arises and provides a third option. However, that is not what happens in this novel. Rather Good as defined by the character of Cyril Grey triumphs, leaving the dogs to gnaw on Douglas' entrails. So why then is it that Cyril does not end the book on a triumphant note? Why does he instead spend some time in the hospital to recover? The answer I simple and here we refer to Kleinian rather than Jungian terms. For Cyril, having destroyed the bad parent must bring the evil back into himself. We see this on the last page of the book in the following line: "Cyril Grey had understood that the corpse of Douglas was his own; that the perception of identity he had of himself with all other living things had come to him, and raised him to a great Adeptship." This adeptship is the Kleinian Depressive Position, where the projected evil and anxiety (i.e. bad mother - bad breast) is reintrojected into the self and we must experience great sorrow for the hurt that we have caused the person who carried this projection for us. We may therefore understand one level of interpretation of this dream - novel being about infantile splitting in the author's personality and his entry into the Depressive Position. However, it must be noted that Cyril is never shown to us as a new being. And it is my belief through reading some of Crowley's biographers, Regardie, Symonds and his autobiography that he never fully completed this transition into adult defenses and behaviors. Instead, he was left as our character in his novel with the notion that he must undertake the "path of the Tao," but without the capacity to actually go forward into it. This is clearly evidenced in the reported behaviors by those close to him and his reports in his autobiography which show marked use of primitive defenses such as splitting, projection and constant attempts to communicate through projective identification. In the novel we can see this in the fact that the early god-image in Simon Iff no longer understands him. And that the later god-image represented by Mahathera Phang, though he clearly understands, does nothing to help him enter into this state and remains silent and split from the ego. So that in the final words of the novel, the good remains separate from Cyril and he is left only to contemplate his identity with the corpse of evil. The next level of interpretation that we may examine is a far more Jungian version of this dream and centers around the relationship of the dream ego (Cyril) and the soul-image (Lisa). These interpretations are based upon the classical Jungian notion that each man's primary linkage to the unconscious is through the interior feminine, which he refers to as anima. Moreover, the more clearly linked any given man is to his unconscious process, the less he will have to project his anima and find it in external women. It should be said that the image of soul is wider than simply that of the personal unconscious and in fact takes in all of collective unconscious, as Jung says in his Collected Works Volume 9, Part 1 (pp 42-53). So if Cyril is the ego and Lisa is the soul then we have a fairly powerful picture of an ego-dominated individual who is unable to live according to the law of Thelema. For the relationship between the two is seductive, coercive and manipulative. Cyril as the ego chooses and uses Lisa for this experiment in an elemental embodiment like a rancher breeding a mare, even though she agrees to the experiment. Still if Cyril is, as the old G... D... formula suggests, working towards being more than human, then we learn that super-humans are allowed to use the rest of us as cattle. This seems to be in direct contradiction of our understandings the goals of the Brotherhood of Adepts of Light. After all, Cyril makes no attempt to go after her and leaves Lisa in the care of the Black Lodge that he so hates. By this behavior of the dream-ego, we begin to see how truly ego dominated Crowley is. In Jungian terms, health in the second half of life is accomplished by the relativazation of the Ego in favor of the Self. A Thelemic way of interpreting this might be the formula "Do what thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law". However, here is Crowley firmly into middle age at this point in his life, and his dream - novel shows us an individual who not only values the ego, but seems to devalue the soul image and by implication the Self or the True Will. However, since the Anima is a separate complex from the Self it might be overstating this case based upon behavior only of Cyril towards Lisa. Perhaps what we have is simply a showing of the rough relationship between the Anima and the Ego, which does give birth to a being of another order in human form in the person of the Moonchild. For anyone who has been in therapy, this notion of a problematic relationship between these two complexes would not be surprising. However, when we see Cyril's reaction to the loss of the Moonchild we can finally understand that Crowley apparently wants nothing to do with it. So by extension we might think that Crowley wants nothing to do with the birth of his own Self or in his True Will. And the way of the abandonment is telling. For he receives a note by the head of his order on the day of the loss telling him three boys have been born to the head. We might say three ego-dominated children of the mind replace Cyril's one child of the soul. And when that happens he abandons the Moonchild into the hands of the Negative Mother image. In his book HE, Robert Johnson tells us that this Negative Mother image in the man is "pure poison." And that the mother dominated man or Puer is unable to ever live up to his full potential, that he will always remain the boy trying to please the critical and devouring mother.
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