A dancer dies twice – once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful. – Martha Graham
The 2010 film Black Swan is a deeply wise and convincing psychological account of the inner journey required of the ballerina protagonist to fully embody the dual female lead roles in a production of Swan Lake.
In Tchaikovsky’s original 1877 ballet (based to some extent on German folk tales), an evil sorcerer has condemned Princess Odette to live as a white swan during the day. Only at night, by the side of an enchanted lake created from her mother’s tears, can she return to human form. The spell can only be broken if one who has never loved before swears to love her forever, and Prince Siegfried does just that. But at a costume ball in which Siegfried must choose a wife, the sorcerer arrives with his daughter, Odile (the black swan), whom he has transformed to look like Odette, and Siegfried chooses her. Realizing his mistake, he hurries back to the lake to apologize. Odette forgives him, but his betrayal cannot be undone. Rather than remain a swan forever, she chooses to leap into the lake and die, as does Siegfried. Ascending to Heaven, they will remain united in love.
Since the original performance there have been dozens of productions (including a 1995 all-male version), with all kinds of different conclusions, from tragic to happy. A lake created from her mother’s tears! Doesn’t that image speak to us all in this time of pandemic, genocide and environmental collapse? As Angelica Frey writes,
Swan Lake is notable for its symphonic quality and its dreamlike atmosphere. But it’s also known for casting mandates that require the ballerina dancing the role of the Swan Queen, Odette, to also perform the role of Odile... “Movements used for Odette in Act II are repeated for Odile in Act III and give credence to the character and her ability to deceive Prince Siegfried,” writes Florence Waren.
The black costume that mirrors its white counterpart only cemented itself as tradition in the 1940s, not long before people across the Third World began to throw off their colonial overlords – and Black people began to demand inclusion into the mainstream of American culture.
This binary opposition of Odette-Odile / black-white reminds us of the polarity of conscious-unconscious, or (in Jungian terms) persona-shadow. And on the sociological level, it evokes issues of race in America.
Black sheep, Black Sambo, Black Lives Matter, Black Sox scandal, Blackmail – We find the dark or projected “other” in many other films, as Gershon Reiter writes in The Shadow Self in Film. In Black Swan, these opposites are in a dynamic tension in the form of extreme control of the body’s needs and its opposite, the need to periodically abandon the individual ego and lose one’s self in communal ecstasy (mythologically, Apollo vs Dionysus, or perhaps Athena vs Aphrodite).
This is the psychic territory that Black Swan invites the viewer into. The plot revolves around a production of Swan Lake by a prestigious ballet company. It requires a ballerina to play the innocent and fragile White Swan, for which the emotionally cold Nina is a perfect fit, as well as the dark and sensual Black Swan, which are qualities better embodied by her earthy rival Lily. While her delicate innocence, combined with technique and discipline is perfect for the White Swan, her challenge is to go beyond herself and undergo the metamorphosis into the Black Swan. She must be both/and rather than either/or.
Her quest is complicated by her relationship with her domineering mother, who long ago abandoned her own ballerina dreams, only to live her obsession through her daughter. Nina is 28 years old, the same age at which her mother had retired, but she lives emotionally as an innocent young girl, in a pink bedroom full of stuffed animals. “Nina” means “little girl” in Spanish. Her last name is Sayer (from which the story may well take us through “Say-er,” “Say her,” “Say her name,” and possibly all the way to “See-er” or “Seer.” We’ll see. Her mother seems to play the role of the sorcerer who keeps Nina trapped in the mother realm and unable to become whole.
Meanwhile, the name Lily (rhyming with “Odile”) evokes the lily flower, which represents both chastity and the purity achieved through death. Dan Ross writes that Lily
...is the familiar form of Lillith, the first woman who rejected Adam because she would not submit to a man. Lillith was considered evil because she was uninhibited and unrestrained, so she was banished (to shadow). This is a perfect description of Lilly who is all that Nina is not. It is not surprising that Nina fantasizes making love with Lily.
The intense, competitive pressure and Nina’s obsessive perfectionism, combined with her desire to escape her mother’s spell causes her to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into hallucinations, suspicion, betrayal and apparent violence. Many reviewers focus on Black Swan’s depiction of madness. Yes, but to only perceive the film on this level is to miss its deeper significance for the viewer. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov writes,
...the film can be perceived as a poetic metaphor for the birth of an artist, that is, as a visual representation of Nina’s psychic odyssey toward achieving artistic perfection and of the price to be paid for it.
In 2025, nearly a quarter century since the “War on Terror” began, when we are assaulted daily by the latest pronouncements of our pathologically narcissistic leadership, we remember the words of Blaise Pascal:
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
As archetypal psychologists, we know that society prefers to label anyone who questions our consensus reality as mad. And as mythologists, we remember that the original meaning of the word “competition” is petitioning the gods together. In a Jungian fantasy of individuation (or better, as James Hillman would have argued, Psyche and Eros), there is no binary opposition between Nina and Lilly. They are co-conspirators (to breathe together) in the opus, or great work. And this soul work absolutely requires the loss of innocence.
Nina is constantly looking into or reflected by mirrors in rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, bath-rooms and train windows. Clearly, she is encountering shadow aspects of herself, especially when Lily appears as friend, rival and lover.
This psychological challenge mirrors Tchaikovsky’s own enchanted lake, which was created from the tears of Odette’s mother. Ultimately, as part of this dance of self-knowing, the two begin to battle in a dressing room during a break in the performance. Nina throws Lilly into the mirror and cracks it into pieces before (in her hallucination?) stabbing her.
From a psychiatric point of view, Nina is “cracking up.” But traditional wisdom would see this as an essential, if dangerous step in the breakdown of an ego, of a constricted sense of identity, a fall out of the familiar into liminal, initiatory space. Only then, as if she has incorporated Lily’s essence, as if this scene was a metaphorical Eucharist, can she embody the black swan, which she does fully in the following act. Hillman places the movement toward black in an alchemical context:
Therefore, each moment of blackening is a harbinger of alteration, of invisible discovery, and of dissolution of attachments to whatever has been taken as dogmatic truth and reality, solid fact, or dogmatic virtue. It darkens and sophisticates the eye so it can see through.
Eight hundred years ago, Rumi wrote:
When towers or minarets get torn down,
Then Dervishes can begin their community.
Not until faith turns into betrayal and betrayal into trust
Can any human being become part of the truth.
In 2025, we face the classic psychological question of the mirror. Can Americans see ourselves, see what we have been doing in the world, to the world, to make the Mother weep? Does the mirror show us the Fascist vultures circling around our democracy? Do we see the Fascists we arm and financially support, from El Salvador to Israel? As above, so below.
Nina’s soul opus moves in two seemingly opposite directions: towards incorporating her dark twin, and away from the suffocating grasp of her mother. But neither move can happen without the simultaneous work of the other move. Nina can only fully embody the Black Swan in performance, thus achieving her goal of perfection, after she has broken from her mother, broken her dressing room mirror and broken Lilly’s (or perhaps her own) body.
Part Two
A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free! – Nikos Kazantzakis
What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? – Theodore Roethke
The quest to be perfect may well represent the quest to be whole, even if wholeness includes imperfection, as Marion Woodman writes in Addiction to Perfection. Beyond that, we can only speculate on the feminine mysteries of escaping the mother’s grasp, partially because, traditionally, most women have had to wrestle with the reality of ultimately becoming mothers themselves. And, since the Greek myths that we know were created within a deeply patriarchal culture, the great majority of them describe the quests of the masculine, solar, heroic nature. Some Jungians have tended to resolve this tricky issue by claiming that these are stories of the individuation of the masculine principle within all people, regardless of gender. I don’t know if all women, not to mention people of non-binary gender, would agree.
We can interpret some of them as initiation stories that involve breaking out of the localized realm of the mother to emerge and return, acknowledged by the fathers as adults before the entire community. My essay “Initiation and the Mother” describes several distinct patterns described in these myths. Some of these routes to the father are more successful than others, but it’s worth noting that the name Heracles means “the glory of Hera.” In another essay I consider “The Spell of the Mother.”
Does Nina kill her dark twin or completely accept her to fully embody the dual roles of white and black swans? Does she go mad? Must she descend into madness to achieve the perfection of her art? Does she heal from the madness? What, after all, is madness? From the soul’s perspective, can madness have a purpose? In another essay I address madness in America: Why are Americans so Freaking Crazy?
Let’s not forget that Black Swan, like any great work of art, is not only about the personal or internal; it’s also about society and the external.
Misogynists and imperialists though they were, and scientists that they would eventually become, the Greek mythmakers understood very well that this world contains a basic element beyond rationality. Their holy pantheon included a place for Dionysus, the god of madness. The classicist Walter Otto wrote, “A mad god exists only if there is a mad world which reveals itself through him.” And the Greeks also understood that madness could very well be a necessary stage in knowing oneself, as I write here.
Does Nina literally stab (and perhaps) kill herself, or is the film’s action symbolic? What really matters, as in all stories throughout time, is what is evoked in us. “Reality” – for both her and us – shifts as she alternately conflicts with, makes love with and then kills her shadow double. Is it herself she kills, that she makes love with? In the end, does her physical death symbolize a successful initiation – or an unsuccessful one? As her life slips away from the fatal wound, Nina mutters, “I felt it. Perfect. I was perfect.” The final shot, rather than the traditional fade-to-black, is a fade-to-white, as if the white swan / childish / innocent / uninitiated “niña” has died, to be replaced by the adult black swan of experience. Dan Ross concludes that
...her death is the price we pay when we give ourselves over to the archetypal completely without maintaining hold on the totality of our personality and its roots in the outer world...The risk in integration of the shadow is that one can be consumed by it and over-identify with it and become psychotic. So Nina goes from one Swan to another but remains a swan, inflated, disconnected from the outer world, relationships, and in the end dies...She was unable to keep the two realms in tension, the swan realm and the human realm.
I disagree (although his assessment may well be more relevant in my discussion of a second film, in Part Six of this essay), and I argue that in tragic drama, as in any dream, death is symbolic of what needs to die so that something greater, or deeper, may be born. Readers of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocencemay recall that there has been an ongoing academic dispute over the ending of Euripides’ play The Bacchae. Do Cadmus and Agave make Pentheus whole again by reconstituting his dismembered body? Is the play about a successful initiation or a failedinitiation? The rational mind may struggle with such questions, but the soul lives them, and does not require the easy escape of answers. As the director character in Black Swan says, Swan Lake’s Odette “...in death finds freedom.”
Part Three
Whoever isn’t busy being born is busy dying. – Bob Dylan
In mythology, swans (which we naturally assume to be white) are linked to Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Brigid and the Virgin Mary. Solar gods such as Zeus and Brahma and the Celtic deities Belanus and Lugh descend from Heaven disguised as swans. The Hindu goddess Saraswati rides a swan. Swans are said to symbolize purity, grace, beauty, loyalty (they mate for life), unity, love, hope and transformation (they migrate, and the Ugly Duckling transforms into one). As such, they are popular images on jewelry, T-shirts, tattoos and coffee mugs.
Above all, the white swan embodies the attributes of spirit. Chapter Two of my book discusses the differences between spirit and soul:
Concepts, like Apollo, are detached; they neutralize our direct participation in the world, distancing us by relying on the eye’s passivity, assessing from safe distances. Percepts are involved, relying on the “secondary” senses (olfactory, tactile, acoustic.) We are “perceptive” when we penetrate to the core. However, each requires the other – what we might also call soul and spirit – for completion, since life will not be confined to a single mode of knowing. Spirit is transcendent and soul is immanent. Zen teacher John Tarrant writes:
“...where spirit is too dominant, we are greedy for pure things: clarity, certainty, and serenity... (but) soul in itself does not have enough of a center...If soul gives taste, touch, and habitation to the spirit, spirit’s contribution is to make soul lighter, able to escape its swampy authentic-city, to enjoy the world without being gravely wounded by it.”
Historians portray Greek civilization as extremely rational. But the Greeks themselves imagined a balance between the brothers, which they enshrined at Delphi, their religious center. It was Apollo’s home, but he relinquished it to Dionysus for three months each year.
The history of religion is an unstable relationship between these opposites, with rebellious impulses periodically threatening patriarchal control. Perhaps all history oscillates between Apollonian order and Dionysian energy. Cultural stability, however, requires a dynamic, ever-shifting balance. Too much sunshine dries us up, while excess moisture rots us and drives us crazy. Extreme order leads to stagnation, dogma and authoritarianism; too much reliance on the intuitive soul brings chaos, anarchy and collapse. Emphasizing one extreme, we eventually endure the other as a correction. When society literalizes Apollo’s spiritual beauty into formal religion, correct behavior and rational science, then literalized – and potentially violent – Dionysian subcultures arise.
The highly evocative black swan image invites internal movement into the dark spaces of soul.
Well before this film appeared in 2010, we find many references in popular culture. The Black Swan was a 1942Tyrone Power swashbuckler pirate film based on a 1932 novel of the same name by Rafael Sabatini. At least eleven other writers have published short stories or novels with Black Swan as title. There are at least three independent Black Swan bookstores, in California, Kentucky and Virginia. There’s a Black Swan barbeque sauce and a Black Swan home décor store. Black Swan Green is the name of an English village in the novel of the same name by David Mitchell. Singers and rock bands have recorded at least twelve separate songs, albums – and an opera – with Black Swan in the titles.
Black Swan Theory is a metaphor used by economists and financiers. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the widespread insistence that they were obvious in hindsight. The term is based on an ancient assumption that actual black swans did not exist – until they were discovered in the wild. The phrase “black swan” itself derives from the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal‘s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno“ (”a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”). Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper have used the metaphor to describe the fragility of any system of thought in which a set of conclusions can be potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved.
But by far the most common use of the term is in Australia, where “swan” almost always implies “black swan.” The country’s only native swan officially represents the state of Western Australia, as depicted on its flag and coat-of-arms. The symbol appears on Australian coins, postage stamps, logos, mascots, sports teams, businesses, corporations, railways, universities, hospitals, mines, religious heraldic emblems, a literary magazine and several dozen place names including streets, towns, districts, rivers and islands.
So much for the swan as symbol of national pride, or if you prefer, as gang color. But more to our purposes, it seems that “black swan” may also indicate a grudging acceptance of the nation’s own dark side – its indigenous people who long before had named most of those places with terms that translate as black swan. Indeed, in the 1920s anthropologists recorded a man known as the “last of the black swan group” of the Nyungar people, who claimed that their ancestors were once black swans who became men.
Part Four
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals precisely and inexorably what they do not know about themselves. – James Baldwin
As long as we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord. – Increase Mather
Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. – Toni Morrison, A Mercy
I’d like to imagine that the Australian stories of black swans who became men refer to times (as in Greek myth) when gods and mortals walked the Earth together in harmony, when soul and spirit, body and mind, male and female or nature and culture were not so terribly divided as they are in our post-modern, oppositional language, religion and politics.
For hundreds of years, these polarities have been most concretely symbolized by black and white, leading to definitions of “black” that include:
- Marked by an atmosphere lacking in cheer
- Not conforming to high moral standards
- Unclean, polluted, rotting
- Being without light
- Evil
Black: the Black Death, black shirts, black cats and bats, Black Panthers, black leather, black holes, black magic, the chimney sweep, the Black Knight, black-clothed priests, inquisitors and Puritans. The witch and the Grim Reaper. The Heart of Darkness. Black Madonna and Kali. Blackballed, blacklisted, black sheep, the black hand, black widow, black lung, blackhead, blackmail, Black Friday, black market, “in the black”, black gold, black ice, the Black Forest, the black box, black mood, black cloud, black eye, black of night, little black dress, black mambo, black widow, black light, black belt, blackout, the dark continent, going black and of course, Black people and Black Power. The Greeks believed that an excess of “black bile” caused melancholy – a word rooted in their words for black and bile.
Our mythologies and theologies create values that praise a “white” world. Indeed, well before the age of colonialism, Europeans assumed that blackness lacked the virtues associated with whiteness. In 1488 it was nothing unusual for Pope Innocent (!) VIII to give African slaves as presents to his cardinals.
But depth psychology – and Black Swan – insist that the more we identify with white, the more seductive black becomes. Hillman writes:
The negative definition of black promotes the moralization of the black-white pair. Black then is defined as non-white, and is deprived of all the virtues attributed to white. The contrast becomes opposition, even contradiction...It carries the meanings of the random and the formless. Like a black hole, it sucks into it and makes vanish the fundamental security structures of Western consciousness.
Above all, black is terrifying because it threatens (or invites) the collapse of the whole house of cards.
We are all well aware in our bones, in our indigenous roots, that the white imagination, white “thinking” and even white privilege are profoundly unsatisfying. We all know that our fear and hatred of both the internal, black Other and the external, Red Other (originally the Red Indian, and for most of the 20th century, the Red Communist) merely cover over our envy of their perceived freedoms and our desire to know them in ourselves.
However, we also know that our demythologized world no longer provides secure ritual containers for the painful work of remembering who we really are. D. H. Lawrence wrote:
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
So, while black (as descent into darkness, and as African American culture) invites America to heal the world and heal itself, most of us take the easier way out, into hatred, segregation and scapegoating.
Black Swan, for all its references to classical dance, is an American film that takes place entirely in America’s cultural center, New York. We view it, regardless of our superficial ideals and ideologies, as Americans. And not just as Americans, but as Christians. Hillman writes:
You may be Jew or Muslim, pay tribute to your god in Santeria fashion, join with other Wiccas, but wherever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits. Christianism is all about us, in the words we speak, the curses we utter, the repressions we fortify, the numbing we seek, and the residues of religious murders in our history...Once you feel your own personal soul to be distinct from the world out there, and that consciousness and conscience are lodged in that soul (and not in the world out there) and that even the impersonal selfish gene is individualized in your person, you are, psychologically, Christian.
Elsewhere, he places mental illness within this context:
As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology...Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life...It reminds of death...true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression.
The English term “white” to characterize an ethnic group first occurred in 1604, after the perception of Africans as “black”. White as a term for Christians in America became firmly established by 1680. So we speak of Black Swan in American language, where the fundamental symbolism of white and black has never relaxed its hold on our imaginations. Nearly a hundred years ago, Carl Jung returned from a visit to the U.S. and wrote,
When the American opens a...door in his psychology, there is a dangerous open gap, dropping hundreds of feet...he will then be faced with an Indian or Negro shadow.
Some languages have only two colors, black and white. In languages with a third color term, that term is invariably red. I argue in Chapter Seven of my book that over time, in a curious blend of history and archetype, the American soul projected itself in red, white and black images. White, of course, speaks to us of our national sense of purity and innocence, while black and red represent the “Others” who threaten us from within and from without.
By the late seventeenth century, America’s primary model for both class distinction and class conflict had become relations between white planters and black slaves, rather than between rich and poor. The new system, writes Theodore Allen (author of The Invention of the White Race), insisted on “the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group.”
Consider that statement again. This is our American heritage. Almost everywhere, for most of American history, despite the superficial ideology of freedom and equality, absolutely everyone understood that any person with white skin had infinite privileges over absolutely anyone with black skin, regardless of the economic status of either person. And the brutal polarity of identity received religious confirmation. Since poverty equaled sinfulness (to the northern Puritan) and black equaled poor (to the southern Opportunist), then it became obvious that blackness equaled sin.
The process of exclusion and subordination required a massive lie about black inferiority that has been enshrined in our national narrative. “After all,” writes Tim Wise,
…to accept that all men and women were truly equal, while still mightily oppressing large segments of that same national population on the basis of skin color, would be to lay bare the falsity of the American creed.
Similarly, the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote, “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.”
The myth of the Old South, writes Orlando Patterson, stated that the presence of the Other, not a slavery-based economy, had caused its shameful defeat in the Civil War. The ex-slave symbolized both violence and sin to an obsessed society. He was “obviously” enslaved to the flesh, and his skin invited a fusion of racial and religious symbolism. His “black” malignancy was to the body politic what Satan was to the soul. “The central ritual of this version of the Southern civil religion...was the human sacrifice of the lynch mob”. In 1899, before torturing him, ten thousand Texans paraded their black victim on a carnival float, like the King of Fools, like Dionysus in the Anthesteria, or like Christ at Calvary. Patterson writes, “...the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded...”
But in 2025 we continue to make a terrible mistake when we locate racism exclusively in the South, or exclusively among reactionaries, blatant racists or the uneducated. Prior to the Civil War, Northern mobs attacked abolitionists on over two hundred occasions, and Northern mobs attacked Martin Luther King Jr’s marches for open housing in 1966.
Joel Kovel asserted that there are two kinds of racism. One is the obvious dominative racism that developed in close contact (including the privilege of rape) between master and slave. The second – aversive racism – arose from Puritan associations of blackness with filth. Alexis De Tocquevile wrote in Democracy in America (1835),
...prejudice appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.
Indeed, New York City’s 1720 population of seven thousand included 1,600 blacks, mostly slaves. And the two colonies with the strongest religious foundations – Massachusetts and Pennsylvania – were the ones that first outlawed “miscegenation.”
The terrible logic of “othering” – its logical conclusion – takes hatred beyond the requirements of capitalism, beyond the entertainment uses of race, all the way to genocide. As recently as 100 years ago, 27 states passed eugenics laws to sterilize “undesirables.” A 1911 Carnegie Foundation “Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population” recommended euthanasia of the mentally retarded in gas chambers. The solution was too controversial, but in 1927 the Supreme Court allowed coercive sterilization, ultimately of 60,000 Americans.
The last of these laws were not struck down until the 1970s. But after 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic throwing millions out of work and onto the streets, the most extreme forms of gratuitous cruelty have re-emerged, with several prominent Republicans hinting that it would be better to let poor elderly people die rather than jeopardize the economy (and Trumpus’ re-election chances). I’ll speak more about euthanasia below.
For some three hundred years, the distinction between black and white, with all its moral implications, remains central to white, Christian identity. And especially in times of economic uncertainty, any factual or emotional arguments to the contrary – or gestures of black equality – continue to provoke immense anxiety in the white mind and justify the most reactionary politics. In 2020, ten years after Black Swan was released, whites in Georgia lynched a black man for the crime of jogging through their neighborhood.
Part Five
To become an American is essentially to divest oneself of a past identity, to make a radical break with the past. – Herman Melville
...the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. – Herman Melville
What is this standard of “whiteness” by which Europeans and Americans have defined themselves for so long? My book argues that American whiteness is a perceived “not-redness” and “not-blackness.” In other words, for perhaps fifteen generations, countless “white” people have believed that they know who they are because they lack the characteristics of the Other: primitive, lazy, irrational, impulsive, violent, untrustworthy or promiscuous. And let’s be crystal clear about this. These are all psychological projections with which white Europeans have stereotyped people of color throughout the Third World to justify the terrible crimes of colonialism and convince themselves of their own innocence and moral superiority.. And for a thousand years they have sent their young men to rape, slaughter and die for God’s will to triumph, often perpetrating the most hideous atrocities upon the truly innocent “for their own good.”
Taking this moral disorder to its pathological extreme, Melville’s Captain Ahab believes that the white whale that men call Moby Dick is the embodiment of pure evil. And let’s be clear about this as well: why does Ahab hate the whale with such malicious intensity? Because on a previous voyage, the whale had taken his leg in self-defense while Ahab was hunting him. In his personal (and national) madness, Ahab, professional butcher of whales, has convinced himself that Moby Dick had victimized him. Like all colonists from Crusaders to Pilgrims to Zionists, the perpetrator has turned the actual victim into the aggressor and hastaken on the role of the Old Testament god of vengeance.
But why a white whale?
Chapter 42(The Whiteness of The Whale)has been described asthe heart of the entire novel. Melville begins by acknowledging the common idea that whiteness symbolizes beauty, innocence, purity and goodness. He then addresses the mystery of identity that propels our hateful obsessions about the Other:
...there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood...which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles ...that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.
...even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse...it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and...the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind...Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with thought of annihilation?...is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?...pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper ...And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Perhaps Melville, ten years before the Civil War, was also acknowledging the chasm of meaninglessness that even then lay just below the surface of American identity. Interested readers should read Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence trilogy. Gabrielle Bellot writes that just below the narrative of Moby Dick is the theme of race:
...it is a template for Melville’s, and our, America: a world populated as much with gestures towards racial equality as with casual racist assumptions...chasing Moby Dick, that avatar of whiteness, means fighting against the meaninglessness of the world, hoping that, through some bloody violence, life-purpose will bloom into existence. Ahab pursues the whale out of a manufactured anger, in a quest to give his life some vague value...
Six years after Moby Dick and three years before the war, Melville completed his thinking about the white / red / black triad of American innocence, writing (in The Confidence-Man) of “Indian hating”, a unique dimension in which religious zeal, barbaric cruelty, capitalist land-grabbing – and sacrificial ritual – merged to create genocide. What Ahab attempted to do to the white whale, his nation had been doing to Native America for 250 years. It was so ingrained in the national character that by Melville’s time, he wrote that hatred of Indians had become a “metaphysic.”
Nearly 175 years after Moby Dick, tens of millions of Americans continue to wrestle, knowingly or not, with the question of identity. Who the Hell are we? Are we really nothing more than “not the Other”? Does our “manufactured anger” – or more accurately, displaced anger – give our lives “some vague value”? Is there still a positive definition of “American” that we can speak out loud without laughing or weeping? The good news is that countless good-hearted liberals have been offered the opportunity to awaken from their life-long trance of innocence and privilege. The bad news...well, you know the bad news. For more on the issue of white privilege, see my essays “Privilege” and “Affirmative Action For Whites”.
…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. – James Baldwin
Part Six
Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance. – Henri Matisse
Why is art so expensive? Otherwise, no one would buy it. – “Max”
To be born is to be weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. – Ben Okri
I don’t develop; I am. – Pablo Picasso
This essay now shifts from a very famous, Oscar-winning (Best Picture and Best Actress) movie to two films that almost no one saw outside of the art houses.
The same week in 2010 that I saw Black Swan in a theater, I also discovered the 2002 film Max (on Netflix), a speculative account of Adolf Hitler’s life during the fall and winter of 1918. This was just after the end of World War One, when the unemployed veteran who’d survived four years in the trenches was wavering between his ambition to create art and the temptation of extremist politics.
Few of us can imagine Germany’s postwar poverty, inflation and violent conditions except by seeing the 1972 film Cabaret, which is set much later, in 1931, when the Weimar republic was collapsing and Hitler was close to taking power. For an even darker presentation, watch the German TV series Babylon Berlin, taking place around 1929 (Netflix).
Thinking we’re familiar with the man who became the all-powerful Fuhrer, we have universally cited his face as the embodiment of pure evil. However, that is an archetypal image, a projection from the collective unconscious, from us. As an archetype, it is a potential characteristic that we all carry. This archetype was embodied most famously by one person for fifteen years.
Dozens of films have been made about Hitler, many of them, curiously, as comedies. Perhaps this represents the difficulty of understanding the genesis of such evil. But Max may be the only film that has wondered how that archetype chose that particular man, and possibly the only one to depict his precarious psychological state before he became a public figure. What was that state? Liminality – the condition of “betwixt-and-between”, when one has been torn loose from everything one once knew to be true, when one’s fate hangs in the balance. It’s the condition that all traditional societies recognized. Such societies provided the elders and the bounded ritual conditions to guide their initiates through the terrible passage to adulthood. In some cases, such a passage went through the territory of reliving old trauma.
At bottom, Black Swan and Max deal with the same theme: the essential encounter with our early wounds – what we have repressed and condemned to the “dark side” of consciousness – to access and offer our gifts to the world. This is a common, even clichéd theme these days, but both filmshad me asking myself, What are we willing to pay attention to? Just how much of our personal and collective darkness are we willing to know, to welcome, to love? What are we willing to sacrifice? What price are we willing to pay to manifest a truly creative life? The ballerina does enter the heart of darkness and consequently gives the performance of a lifetime, but (if we interpret the ending literally) she pays the ultimate price.
In Max, the older, aristocratic Jew Max Rothman has lost an arm in the war, given up his own am-bition to paint and become an art dealer. He is also a reluctant mentor to the younger Adolf, despite the younger man’s raging anti-Semitism. Max is convinced that below the anger he can see an “authentic voice” and encourages him to “go as deep as you possibly can” to create something valuable. They argue about the purpose of art. Max, contrasting the hesitant and insecure Hitler with the impassioned, left-wing artists Georg Grosz and Max Ernst (both historical figures), says, “It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just has to be true.”
But another man is competing for Hitler’s soul. The extremist officer Karl Mayr (another historical figure), recognizes in Adolf one whose years at the front had been the happiest of his life. In the trenches, writes Joseph Persico, Hitler had escaped from an aimless existence. He had come to know comradeship, purpose, the respect of his fellows. Mayr senses more: Adolf’s intellectual and oratorical potential, his untapped charisma, and an unresolved (uninitiated), self-hatred that he can channel into the nationalist and anti-communist causes. He arranges for the army to pay Hitler’s living expenses and tutors him in the arts of propaganda, scapegoating and instigation of mobs. Hitler, significantly, begins his speaking career by invoking innocence: Germany had been defeated only because the good, pure, brave nation had been “stabbed in the back” by Communists and the traditional Others, the Jews.
Adolf (played by Noah Taylor) can go either way; he can still possibly inhabit his better self and reject his darker potential.
But Rothman can only offer the enticements and mild satisfactions of the same kind of secular liberalism that so many would reject in the 1960s. By contrast, Mayr offers him ritual. It may be deformed, but it is still ritual, something that our indigenous souls always recognize. And he offers Adolf a place within a community, twisted as it is, of hate – something that the Teutonic mind has been familiar with for a thousand years. Hitler is beginning his transition to (as Jung saw it) embodying the old Teutonic war god. He will become the latest in a long line of charis-matic Germans who have manipulated mass resentment of the powerful only to turn it against the weak. For more on this theme, read The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn.
And consider that in 2025 we are no longer surprised at the comparisons between Hitler and Trumpus. America struggles, with less and less success, to keep from looking in the mirror, as I write here.
In one of his most famous quotes, Jung said, “Where love rules, there is no will to power and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other”. But Hillman saw this view as the “epitome of the romantic view of both love and power”:
So long as the notion of power is itself corrupted by a romantic opposition with love, soul, goodness and beauty, power will indeed corrupt...The corruption begins not in power but in the ignorance about it.
Hitler will choose power (over people) rather than love (of art) because his daimon demands it. Hillman’s 1997 book The Soul’s Code reintroduced the ancient and indigenous idea that we all are born with built-in stories. He called it the “acorn theory”:
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place (before birth) and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny...What determines eminence is less a call to greatness than the call of character, that inability to be other than what you are in the acorn, following it faithfully or being desperately driven by its dream... (Children) are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into.
The early Gnostic author of the Gospel of Thomas expressed the idea that we must listen to the daimon or live unfulfilled lives:
If you bring forth what is within you,
What you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
What you do not bring forth will destroy you.
But it remains an eternal mystery that for a mysterious few, the daimon becomes demonic. The Greek philosopherPlotinus asked: “How could a wicked character be given by the Gods? Can one be called to murder?” Can the acorn harbor a “bad seed”? Hillman offers few answers, but he lists some signs of the demonic: “...absolute certainty, utter conviction...sure and uncanny knowledge ...The demonic does not engage: rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth”. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai suggested that
From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
Looking back at a life, we may be able to identify the working of the daimon. One of Hitler’s biographers noted that even at age seven, young Adolf draped an apron over his shoulders, “climbed on a kitchen chair and delivered long and fervent sermons”. Hitler was chosen. Hillman writes:
The driving animal is the terrible fear of being inadequate to the demanding vision of the daimon. Demonism arises...because of the dysfunctional relation with the daimon. We strive to fulfill its vision fully, refusing to be restrained by our human limitations – in other words, we develop megalomania...The principal difference between Hitler’s possession and that of others...lies in the nature of his personality and the nature of the daimon – a bad seed in a personality that offered no doubts and no resistance...Hitler knew the shadow all too well, indulged it, was obsessed by it, and strove to purge it; but he could not admit it in himself, seeing only its projected form as Jew, Slav, intellectual, foreign, weak, and sick.
The traumas of poverty and racism have condemned millions to lives that Thomas Hobbes described as “nasty, brutish and short.” In the 21st century we have observed many men and, increasingly, women arising from these conditions – or even from affluent but unloving families – only to manifest their worst potentials, join their sociopath oppressors and perpetuate these conditions, as so many contemporary politicians, police, pundits and corporate CEOs do.
But after 30 years in the mythopoetic men’s movement, I’ve been fortunate to have met many men (such as Louis Rodriguez) who survived the worst excesses of urban street life to become poets, teachers, musicians and activists. I recall reading the earlier autobiographies of Malcom X and Claude Brown. Although far more have failed, these lives offer us models of how things could be, given the presence of the right mentors and the right community at the right time. For so many others, we wonder, “What if?”
We can see Max as a “What if?” story. Though they never meet, the two angels of Hitler’s nature compete for his soul, and as no viewer of the film should miss, for the soul of the entire world, for your soul and mine. Rothman, a champion of the new Expressionism, tells him, “You’ve got to take all this pent-up stuff that you’re quivering with and hurl it onto the canvas...Get out of politics...If you put the same energy into your art as you do into your speeches, you might have something going.” But Hitler’s attempt to tap into his pain goes nowhere, emotionally or artistically. Are his wounds too deep, his discipline too weak, or his talent simply insufficient? Perhaps all three.
But there is an easier way out (one that Black Swan’s Nina refuses) – the lure of denying his pain through scapegoating others. Mayr’s advice is superficially similar but more convincing: “You’ve got your own talent.” – which clearly has nothing to do with painting – “Just let it out!”
The difference between Nina and this fictional Hitler is critical and instructive. Because she is both talented and disciplined, she can hold the almost unbearable tension between her angels and her demons. Some might say that because she symbolically kills the demon, she can’t hold that tension for long. But she does make great art – if only briefly – and contributes a lasting gift to the dance world. Adolf, on the other hand, is at best a second-rate artist, and he simply cannot improve his technique or – more importantly – penetrate the terrible nature of his soul.
But he does “go deeper,” mustering a particular discipline and a dominating personality (from persona, mask). Having made his choice between art for art’s sake and art in service to propaganda, he tells Max (eerily predicting the easy hate to be harvested off the internet):
Go deeper, you said. I went deep. Deeper than any artist has gone before! This is the new art! Politics is the new art!...Art and politics equals power!
Max eventually realizes that Hitler makes only “futuristic kitsch”, but he still attempts to channel that ferocity into the art world, where it might be less harmful: “You finally found your voice – the future as a return to the past.” Hitler will absorb that mythical past to invent a future, equally mythic greatness.
An earlier film, The Empty Mirror (1996, Amazon Prime) depicts Hitler (portrayed by Norman Rodway) in his bunker – or perhaps in Hell – displaying the workings of his daimon as he dictates his memoir to a typist and receives several imaginary guests, including Sigmund Freud.
Throughout the film, a movie projector (the ultimate symbol of psychological projection) shows snippets from home movies and selections from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. As he watches, Hitler brags that, after all, he did become a great artist, although not as we might have expected. In an inciteful review of the film, Joe Leydon writes:
The Empty Mirror gives us a portrait of Hitler as the ultimate auteur, a demented director who made the world his soundstage while bringing his personal vision to fruition. Willfully ignoring the harsh reviews that history has given his masterpiece, he boasts: “I have edited the imagination of people not yet born.”...More than a half-century after his death, he remains malevolently alive as the larger-than-life paradigm of evil incarnate that haunts our hearts and minds. And our movie screens. “Film is the magician’s mirror,” Der Fuehrer tells a raptly attentive audience of Hitler Youth. “It is the first art form which allows the artist to project his dreams and fantasies into the inner life of the viewer. To reshape and capture his soul. My works of destruction and grandeur will live on. I am the artist. I am the artwork.”
In 1928, nine years after the events depicted in Max,Edward Bernays (a nephew of Freud’s) published his book Propaganda:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
Seventy-five years later, neuroscientist George Lakoff, in Don’t Think of an Elephant! would name a prime reason why Republicans had won most presidential elections since 1968. While most Democrats who aspire to political office are law school graduates, most Republicans have gone to business schools, which commonly teach not only human motivation but the brain science behind it. I would take that insight a step further. Democrats continue to argue logically, appealing to the head, while Republicans speak the language of American myth, appealing to the body, just as Hitler had mastered and embodied Teutonic myth.
Max ends on Christmas eve, 1918, when Max is murdered by thugs whom Hitler had provoked. (Though not portrayed in Max, less than two weeks later, leftists would go on strike in the violent Spartacist uprising. Hitler’s fascist allies would take the opportunity to crush them, and Germany would begin its descent into that future.)
Nina looks in the mirror and sees her competitor, while Hitler looks in the mirror and sees Odin. The Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki looked in the mirror, saw an old man and wrote:
I sit quietly in lotus position, Meditating, meditating for nothing. Suddenly a voice comes to me: “To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror.”
Here is both the contrast with the ballerina and the frightening commentary on our current politics. Nina, like Sakaki, cracks the mirrors and the masks of Black and White in dramatic expression, while Hitler retreats behind a different mask and inhabits it, embodies it for an entire nation. With neither her talent, nor her commitment, nor an artistic community like hers – an authentic ritual container – he falls victim to his own darkness and the peculiar darkness of his culture (think Darth Vader here – “Vader” is German/Dutch for “father”). He succumbs to the easy lure of projection – hatred of the Other who is oneself – and discovers – we discover – how hate can make its own community.
In doing so, he becomes a conduit for the darkest forces of the psyche and the world. As we know, he will briefly succeed in restoring a sense of destiny – and wounded innocence – in his nation. Max was filmed in 2001, the same year as the beginning of the “War on Terror.” I wonder if its creators had the theme of American innocence in mind. Hillman continues, writing in 1995:
Thwarting the Bad Seed begins with a theory that gives it full recognition...Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge...if each choice is met with accumulating success, as was the case with Hitler for an entire decade, then those successes will reinforce your belief that fate has you on the right track.
That consistent reinforcement of one’s grandiosity, combined with a learned charisma and an innate inability to feel empathy (which is itself reinforced by our American myths) is what creates sociopaths and psychopaths. In other words, a receptive, cooperative, needy community of followers may also be required. Here we encounter the final ingredient for the emergence of the demonic: a receptive, privileged and emotionally traumatized audience, one that has repressed that trauma and replaced it with an unalterable sense of its own innocence:
Innocence seems to ask for evil...evil is attracted to, belongs with innocence...Perhaps innocence is a greater mystery than evil...Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing.
Ten years after Max came out and the same year that Black Swan was released, I finished Chapter Eight of my book with these speculations:
The most dysfunctional among us enact our national myths most clearly...Since the fathers of 1914 sacrificed millions of their sons to the new gods of the age, much has shifted. Four generations later, the rate of change, the literalization of war, the madness of consumerism, the demythologizing of the world and the depths of our alienation have only increased. In Morris Berman’s words, “We have inherited a civilization in which the things that really matter in human life exist at the margin of our culture.”
“We may now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure,” writes Paul Shepard, “…where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men…to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity.” We are talking about psychopaths, men who speak with reassuringly sincere voices yet are completely amoral.
Perhaps we can understand deeply religious men who sponsor torturers and drug smugglers only by comparing them to the original conquistadores. Such men, writes James Wilson, lived “an apparently insoluble compound” of greed, cruelty, deceit, opportunism – and an absolutely literal, legalistic, church-sanctioned piety that assured them of their own salvation. This is the bizarre logic of the modern Calvinists. Since they are already saved, then they are infinitely entitled, and evil deeds are irrelevant to their salvation. The “chosen” are above morality. What are we to make of a Supreme Court Justice – Antonin Scalia –who has publicly stated that there is nothing unconstitutional about executing innocent people?...Their “morality” demands contempt for ethics...true believers, whose ends justify any means; grandiose boy-men who murder not despite their faith but because of it. They see no ethical dilemma in corruption and violence because their twisted mix of smug righteousness and social Darwinism assures them that their victims deserve their fate. Anyone who isn’t a hero is a victim, and all but the inner circle are now Other...
...America’s rulers are not ignorant; they are fully aware of our human and environmental tragedies. The fathers no longer send only the young to be sacrificed; now they offer every-thing to the sky-gods. Whether or not we take their religious rhetoric literally, they are deliberately (if unconsciously) provoking both personal and global apocalypse.
Recall Pentheus (in The Bacchae), emerging from his collapsed palace, even more deter-mined to confront (or to merge with) Dionysus. Thebes/America is a city of uninitiated men, fanatically devoted to the systematic destruction of their own children. A boy-king, who secretly longed for the symbolic death that might effect his transition to manhood, was leading this city. The entire world could almost feel it as a desperate, visceral prayer when, in June 2003, Bush, the self-appointed embodiment of American heroism, challenged the Iraqi resistance to “bring it on!”
Part Seven
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Re-reading this essay in 2013, it occurred to me that Trumpus (Trump = Us) was barely a blip on the national political radar screen, a comic, low-taste character on reality TV and World-Wide Wrestling. Even two years later, the notion of him running for President evoked laughter among us sophisticated, bi-coastal types. The notion was more or less where the idea of Hitler becoming savior of Germany was in 1919, when, in his first recorded speech, he accused the Jews of producing “a racial tuberculosis among nations.”
Just prior to that year, as Max shows us, Hitler had been in crisis (crisis: “decisive point in the progress of a disease...the point at which change must come, for better or worse”). He’d been wavering on the cusp of an initiatory moment, potentially open to any direction or influence. More or less where we are right now.
So let’s be clear about these parallels. Times of intense social change and economic uncertainty can potentially bring out the best in us. But this requires a personal courage (as Black Swan’s Nina musters) and a collective willingness to evoke, acknowledge, accept and perhaps even forgive that darkness. But the confrontation with the shadow is terrifying, and American history has provided far too many examples of precisely the opposite behavior. As I write in Chapter Eight:
Between 1890 and 1920, the migration of eleven million rural people to the cities and the influx of 20 million immigrants resulted in new fears that the spiritual and physical Apollonian essence of America would be cheapened by this Dionysian element. Nativists responded by cranking up the machinery of propaganda once again. Scientists and intellectuals (including David Jordan, first president of Stanford) argued that moral character was inherited, that “inferior” southern and eastern Europeans polluted Anglo-Saxon racial purity. Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton, contrasted “the men of the sturdy stocks of the north” with “the more sordid and hopeless elements” of southern Europe, who had “neither skill nor quick intelligence.”
As I mentioned earlier, 27 states passed eugenics laws to sterilize “undesirables.” A 1911 Carnegie Foundation “Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population” recommended euthanasia of the mentally retarded in gas chambers. The solution was too controversial, but in 1927 the Supreme Court allowed coercive sterilization, ultimately of 60,000 Americans. The last of these laws were not struck down until the 1970s.
Two years before that ruling, in Mein Kampf, Hitler praised American eugenic ideology and situated himself directly in that Anglo-Saxon (Saxony is a state in eastern Germany) tradition:
Neither Spain nor Britain should be models of German expansionism, but the Nordics of North America, who…ruthlessly pushed aside an inferior race.
After he became absolute ruler in 1934, Germany copied American sterilization laws. After the war, defending themselves at the Nuremberg trials, the surviving Nazis quoted that 1927 Supreme Court ruling.
We don’t choose to “other” other people or groups. Othering chooses us. The need to do so seems to enter us quite early on, as parents and society gradually persuade us to identify as part of the larger tribe – to know ourselves, as the ancient Greeks implied – (but) only as we learn that we are not one of them, the others. In this modern world we are established in the first knowledge only because of the second.
I always try to make these parallels clear between mythic or historical themes and our current conditions, but it’s hard to keep up with Trumpus, who is constantly upping the ante of hate and ignorance. As I finish this re-write, he praises the “bloodline” of the eugenicist and racist Henry Ford, threatens to enact absolute power against the media, fires Black and female generals and encourages police violence against anti-racist protestors.
Circular craziness: American racists influenced Hitler’s thinking in 1920, and his life, despite what happened to Europe, became a model for our American fascists a century later. For a clear summary of early eugenicist rantings and their influence on the “alt-right” Trumpus supporters and political provocateurs of today, read here.
Black swans and white vultures: I originally titled this essay, “A Black Swan and a White Madman.” But I need a more poetic counterpoint to “black swan” that includes all the fascist madmen of the past hundred years. Neither “snake” nor “wolf” fits. So I settled on “vultures”, which circle above, out of danger, around dying animals – or cultures – and swoop down to eat them once they can no longer defend themselves.
Vultures are not white, but their metaphorical human equals usually are. It is the time of disaster capitalism, in which financial elites exploit national and international crises to further centralize wealth while citizens are too weak or distracted to resist. It’s the time of vulture funds, which prey on debtors by purchasing cheap credit on secondary markets to make large monetary gains and leave the debtors worse off.
It’s the time of housing vultures, who sucker millions out of their homes for quick profit. It’s the time of hedge fund managers who buy the patents of critical drugs and raise their prices by factors of fifty.
It’s the time of the second Gilded Age, as I write here.
In the first half of 2020, forty million lost jobs and medical insurance (on top of those millions who had already given up searching for jobs and the forty million who already had no health insurance), and the nation’s billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by nearly half a trillion dollars. It got much worse in 2025.
The parallel to Germany: Hitler convinced the ultra-rich to support him, and then he turned on some of them. Another parallel: In 1930, one of Hitler’s most extreme supporters, Horst Wessel, was murdered – allegedly by a communist – and his fellow Nazis quickly turned him into a martyr for the cause. Sound familiar? Another parallel: in 1935, Hitler called in his generals, required them to swear personal allegiance to him rather than to the state and sacked those who refused. Sound familiar?
But we mythologists are always searching for the reframe. Otherwise, there is no point in studying myth. We’re always trying to imagine how a soul – or the soul of a culture – might behave in a world that provided real mythic narratives, genuine ritual containers and elders or mentors who could see the potential that can’t be seen on the ordinary surface of things. The poet Theodore Roethke wrote: “In a dark time the eye begins to see.” The ballerina’s struggle to become who she is supposed to be – and in the process, to integrate her shadow and make her art – offers us hope in this dark time. Toward the end of my book I write:
Now we are called to remember things we have never personally known, to remember what the land itself knows, that which has been concealed from us by our own mythologies. We have the opportunity to remember who we are, and how our ancestors remembered, through art and ritual...Our task is unique: inviting something new, yet familiar, to re-enter the soul of the world...
“Hope is reborn each time someone awakens to the genuine imagination of their own heart,” says Michael Meade...imagination builds a bridge between fate and destiny. We need to use sacred language, in the subjunctive mode: let’s pretend, perhaps, suppose, maybe, make believe, may it be so, what if – and play. This “willing suspension of disbelief” is what Coleridge called “poetic faith.”
What if you were to add your own prayers for the possible here and now – or for the past:
I Wanted to Make a Difference
I didn’t want to be raised by a sad mother. I didn’t want her brother to have died in World War II. It’s hard to change history. Even God can’t change history. But with one trick, I will. Watch me.
It’s 1912. I’ve gone back in time. Adolf Hitler has just been rejected from the Viennese Academy of Art. I speak perfect German. I have a purse full of gold marks. I track down young Adolf and knock on his door. It opens. Ich bin gekommen um deine Bilder zu sehen. I have come to see your paintings. Wie schön, I say. Verwunderlich. I purchase several. I rent a gallery. His paintings get better. He sells more. His mustache gets messier. He keeps painting. World War II never happens. The Jews of Europe, the Gypsies, they all survive. No Hiroshima. No Nagasaki. My uncle has his 23rd birthday. My mother smiles. She is so pretty.
- Penelope Scambly Schott
What if we were to consider (with the stars) the stories that the mega-rich have been telling themselves about themselves and invite them to re-imagine those stories? What if we remembered that actual vultures and similar scavenger birds are necessary for healthy ecosystems, doing the dirty work of cleaning up after death and preventing the spread of disease so that new, healthy life may emerge?
What if we imagined a culture that perceived every single human being in terms of what innate gifts they came into the world to offer? What if, despite the traumas of racism and gender stereotyping, all of us could become who we were meant to be? To close, I invite you to watch an interview with an extraordinary person I briefly knew years ago, who turned his trauma into art. His Name? Gryphon Blackswan.
