Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love

                            by John Ryan Haule
                             Copyright © 1990
                           All Rights Reserved
                    http://www.jrhaule.net/divine.html


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                                   Three

                    The Love Potion: Metaphors Of Depth



     In the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the love potion symbolizes
     the depth, the inevitability, the transcendence and the eternality
     of their love. But it is not the only symbol which points in this
     direction. For example, God actively assists them despite what
     appears to be their sin, and the people are unanimously behind
     them despite their violation of the rules of the social order.
     Furthermore, when Tristan is wounded the first time and no
     medicine in Cornwall can save him, he sets to sea in a boat
     without oars; and the sea carries him directly to the shores of
     Ireland, to Isolde the maker of the poison which threatens him and
     the only person in the world who can cure him. Furthermore, after
     Tristan has been cured and he returns to Cornwall to sing of
     Isolde's beauty rather than pursue a relationship with her, a bird
     carries a strand of her golden hair across sea and land directly
     to King Mark who agrees to marry only the woman to whom it
     belongs; and Tristan is dispatched to find her. We may say, then,
     that the image of the love potion sums up all the forces which
     draw Tristan and Isolde together: God, the people, and all of
     nature.

          Symbolic analogues of the love potion are therefore numerous.
     We have already considered Plato's myth of the round being divided
     into male and female halves which spend their days in search of
     one another. In Chinese legend, when the immortals ordained a
     union between a man and a woman, an invisible red thread which no
     force on earth could break was tied between their feet by the god
     of marriage (Time-Life: 18). Very commonly the literary device
     which serves the purpose of the potion-symbol is that of
     pre-vision. One of the earliest examples is again to be found in
     Plato. He tells the myth in Phaedo (72e-77a) that souls are
     granted, prior to their birth, a vision of the eide, the eternal,
     transcendent ideas or essences of things. We cannot know these
     eide by means of our sense organs, because the senses are limited
     to apprehending particulars. Consequently Plato argues, we
     "remember" them from our pre-birth vision (the concept of
     anamnesis). A contemporary example of this is to be found in Alban
     Berg's opera, Lulu (Act II), where the anti-heroine Lulu declares
     that she can tell in the dark if a man is "made for her" because
     she dreamed of him during an adolescent sickness. A Persian tale
     (Nizami 1959) tells of a pair of royal adolescents, one living in
     Arabia and the other in China, who refuse all the matches their
     parents make for them until the jinn collaborate to bring them
     together by providing them images of one another through their
     dreams. Similarly, in Mozart's Magic Flute Tamino is shown a
     picture of Tamina, the woman the gods have chosen for him, so that
     he will recognize her and be able to rescue her. He falls in love
     with the pictured maiden at once.

          Hans Christian Andersen, too, in his version of the Turandot
     legend,[1] has the hero, Johannes, see her image in a dream long
     before he is ready to meet her. When he first hears of her, he
     learns only that she is a princess who beheads her suitors. He
     declares her "horrible":

          "She should be switched, that is what she deserves. If I
          were the old king, I would beat her till I drew blood".

               . . . [But] when Johannes saw her, his face became
          as red as blood dripping from a wound and he could not
          utter a word. The princess looked like the girl with a
          golden crown that he had dreamed about the night his
          father died. She was so beautiful, and he already loved
          her so much, that he could not believe that she was an
          evil witch who ordered men to be beheaded or hanged,
          because they could not guess the answers to the
          questions she asked them (49).

          In this tale we see ambivalence for the first time. One part
     of Johannes very correctly perceives the princess as a
     demon-possessed, murderous, spoiled brat; for we later learn that
     she is inspired in her beheading by a blood-thirsty mountain
     spirit. His criticism, therefore, stems from a part of himself
     which is well adapted to the real world. Another part of himself,
     however, the part that has drunk the love potion, responds to an
     entirely different order of reality. She is, indeed, "meant" for
     him; he is the only man who can save her; and she is the only
     woman in the world who can complete him. Both parts of Johannes
     are right, but the reader does not experience the tension between
     them. Rather they must be deduced through the symbolism of the
     tale. In Richard Wagner's opera, Lohengrin, however, this inner
     conflict is portrayed directly through the drama and the music.


                           The Story of Lohengrin

          Elsa is accused of murdering her brother in order to
          grab the throne of the Duchy of Brabant. Telramund, the
          man who accuses her, is next in ducal succession and,
          therefore, has a vested interest in getting rid of her.
          The dispute is brought before the king of Germany who
          can afford neither to alienate the people of Brabant by
          deciding against Elsa, nor to lose Telramund's army by
          deciding against him. So he orders God to make the
          decision. He calls for a Gottesgericht, a "judgment of
          God," to be obtained by having Telramund fight a duel
          with whatever knight will champion Elsa's cause.

          When the call for a champion goes out and none responds,
          Elsa prays God to send her the glorious knight she has
          seen in her dreams. The knight actually appears on a
          barge drawn by a swan and wins the duel for Elsa. They
          will be married, but Elsa is never to ask his name or
          origin.

          Before the wedding can take place, however, Ortrud, the
          wife of the defeated Telramund, begins to insinuate
          doubts into Elsa's mind. Ortrud is a magician who prays
          to the entweihte Goetter, the desacralized or profaned
          gods of paganism. At first Elsa is full of confidence:

               You poor thing, you'll never know
               How free from doubt my heart loves!
               You've never had this good fortune
               Which comes from faith, alone!

               Follow me and let me teach you
               How sweet the bliss of purest trust!
               Be yourself converted to the faith:
               There's no good fortune without rue!
               (Act II, scene 2, my translation).

          Ortrud is enraged at this sweet arrogance and accuses
          Lohengrin, the unnamed hero, of relying on the trickery
          of magic rather than divine aid. If she is right, the
          "divine judgment" of the duel is also a trick and Elsa's
          great love is a foolish adolescent crush.

          Although the wedding takes place as planned, Ortrud's
          insinuations have effect; and as soon as they are alone
          in their bridal chamber, Elsa begins to question
          Lohengrin. She notes how sweet her own name sounds from
          his lips; should she not be allowed to pronounce his?
          Can he not make her proud through his trust in her and
          thereby prevent her perishing in worthlessness? In
          answer, Lohengrin appeals to the wonders which attended
          his appearance and his intimate knowledge of her dreams.
          These are insufficient, and Elsa finally demands to know
          his name, title, and land.

          Lohengrin reveals before Elsa, King Heinrich, and all
          the people of Brabant that he is the son of Parsifal,
          the Grail King, sent to work righteousness upon the
          earth. If Elsa had only been able to tolerate his
          anonymity for a period of two years, they would have
          lived happily ever after. But now he must return to the
          Kingdom of the Grail. His swan is transformed into
          Elsa's long-lost brother who ascends the throne of
          Brabant; Lohengrin departs; and Elsa, in her brother's
          arms, sinks slowly to earth, entseelt --
          "dis-en-souled." These are Wagner's stage directions and
          seem to imply that Elsa's soul has departed with
          Lohengrin to reign with him forever in the Kingdom of
          the Grail.


          Two themes in this story illuminate the symbol of the love
     potion and metaphor of love's depth: (a) the fact that Elsa was
     able to conjure her animus into bodily existence and (b) the
     subsequent doubts about Lohengrin's value -- deep, central and
     divine or shallow, peripheral and magical.

          The first of these themes may sound wholly fantastic to those
     who have not had much exposure to what Jung calls the
     "synchronistic" events which so frequently attend archetypal
     experiences. As an analyst I have heard quite a few such stories.
     In particular, I think of one man who reported that he had
     conjured his "anima" into existence one semester in graduate
     school when he had written several passionate papers on the female
     beloved in American literature. When in the stacks of the library
     she appeared in the flesh, he recognized only that she was
     important. In a few weeks he knew she was central, but it was
     several months before he realized that she was the one he had been
     writing about. They had a tumultuous relationship over a period of
     two years. The "naked sword" took several forms and then appeared
     finally in the guise of the woman's fear of the emotional
     intensity they shared: she fled into a marriage with another man.
     Twenty years later, as a college professor, he began to deal with
     the issue in analysis. Eventually, he was inspired to put together
     a college course on certain aspects of romantic love in
     literature, explicitly with the object of coming to understand
     what had happened to him in his youth. No sooner had he put the
     final touches on it than he received a phone call from a woman of
     his own age, a graduate student from another college who wished to
     consult with him on completing her master's degree thesis. This
     time he knew at once that a new chapter was beginning in his own
     thesis. She proved to be another perfect embodiment of his anima
     -- even better, on account of the years of maturation they had
     both gone through.

          Jung himself appears to have had experiences of this type, at
     least with his patients, Sabina Spielrein and Antonia Wolff.
     Although we have no testimony from Jung on the question, something
     of his attitude can be glimpsed from certain passages in
     Spielrein's diary where she is reflecting on how strange the world
     looks now that she has drunk the potion with Jung. One entry, from
     September 8, 1910, was written after she had spent a disappointing
     afternoon with some of her fellow medical students talking of men,
     women, and love:

          So that is supposed to be youth, the strength and
          blossom of humanity? Is it possible I shall never escape
          to a different milieu, with people who love life as I
          do, who know how to find beauty in everything . . . My
          guardian spirit was right in his promise that everything
          I wanted would be fulfilled, if by wanting one means
          that for which one's nature unwaveringly longs
          (Carotenuto, 9).

          Clearly Elsa longed for Lohengrin unwaveringly with all of
     her nature. Right from the start we know that there is something
     right about the earnestness of her faithfulness to the image of
     her animus. The college professor, however, did not know he was
     conjuring up his anima. Of him, we would have to say that his
     nature longed unwaveringly but unconsciously for the woman who
     carried the image of his soul. He has longed more in the style of
     Johannes in the Andersen tale. There is something boyish about it,
     somewhat like the experience of the twelve-year-old Jung who, for
     several days, fought a inner image of God defecating on the Basel
     cathedral . When he finally allowed himself to experience it, he
     found it wholly changed his relationship with religion. Whereas
     his father, a minister, got into a crisis of faith by trying to
     conform his mind to the philosophy of Kant and traditional
     interpretations of the bible, Jung learned that the Holy Spirit
     speaks directly to one's soul. Jung writes: With the experience of
     God and the cathedral I at last had something tangible that was
     part of the great secret -- as if I had always talked of stones
     falling from heaven and now had one in my pocket (1961: 41).

          Clearly Elsa and the college professor are both carrying very
     important "stones" about with them in their pockets. She had
     talked of a knight no one believed existed. Even her devoted
     people feared she was mad and a dreamer (Act I). The professor had
     written and spoken about the beloved he had not yet met in what he
     believed was a theoretical manner, but the woman's appearance --
     twice, and with a twenty year interval -- was as solidly real as a
     stone in his pocket.

          For Elsa to have conjured Lohengrin into existence, she had
     to have longed unwaveringly with her whole nature. It was a
     longing which proceeded from her "center," her Self. The dramatic
     conflict, however, revolves about her doubt: Do I love him from my
     center or from my periphery; is he sent from God or a magician?
     She's inclined to believe she and Lohengrin are connected from
     their centers. The complex within her which doubts this is
     personified by Ortrud, who in fact is a magician. In this play, a
     magician is a worshipper of the old gods of paganism, now
     transformed into demons by the influence of the Christian church.
     Ortrud is able to use their power to work her own will. Hers is an
     ego-centered longing. She conjurs from the conscious "periphery"
     of her psyche rather than from its unconscious center. Elsa wants
     to know if Lohengrin is a figment of Ortrud's imagination or a
     stone in her pocket. In Wuthering Heights Catherine Earnshaw knew
     very well with which level of her psyche she loved. Indeed, she
     had a lover for each of them. She tells Nelly, the narrator:

          My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods:
          time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes
          the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
          rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but
          necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always
          in my mind -- not as a pleasure, any more than I am
          always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being (84).

          This passage tells us the nature of Cathy's tragic mistake in
     Wuthering Heights. She loves Heathcliff from the eternal rocklike
     depths of her psyche. But, knowing their love is timeless, she
     takes it for granted and marries Linton because he can supply the
     smooth aristocratic style she longs for. She wants both loves and
     believes they can hardly conflict with one another, since they are
     so different. Her love for Linton is shallow, because she cannot
     connect with him through her Self. She uses him to insure her
     social standing, respectability, and wealth. This may be a "good
     enough" reason for marriage, insofar as that institution is a
     social, legal, and financial sort of companionship. It is the kind
     of marriage that was "arranged" in former times and which may be
     sought by pragmatic individuals who have never known the divine
     madness of love~or who have known it and decided it was too
     painful. But Cathy is not someone like that. She knows love's
     depths and has no intention of losing Heathcliff. If Elsa had had
     a more trivial love (like Cathy's Linton), she would have known by
     the contrast that her connection with Lohengrin belonged
     unmistakably to her center, to the "eternal rocks" of her psyche.

          When we speak of "levels" or degrees of "depth" in the
     psyche~between seasonal trees and eternal rocks, what is central
     and what is peripheral, and so on~we refer to the theoretical
     division Jung began to articulate in the second decade of this
     century. He distinguished "personal" and "collective" levels. The
     personal psyche includes ego consciousness and the "personal
     unconscious." The latter is comprised of forgotten, overlooked,
     and repressed material that has accumulated over the course of our
     own personal biography. It is characterized by personal
     idiosyncrasies and knows something of time~insofar as, say, a
     dream image can be identified as belonging to one's sixth or
     sixteenth year and is saturated with the joys and traumas of that
     period of life. There is an ordinary, "everyday" character to it,
     whereas the "collective psyche" is characterized by a kind of
     impersonality, transpersonality, and timelessness~very frequently
     with extraordinarily impressive, even uncanny, feeling tone. The
     collective psyche includes those dimensions of our psychic life
     that all of us as human beings have in common, regardless of our
     biographical differences. It is the realm of what Jung calls the
     archetypes. Jung's language can be somewhat confusing on the
     nature of the archetypes; one reviewed (Hobson, 1980) counted more
     than thirty meanings of archetype in one volume of the Collected
     Works. I find it useful to distinguish three levels within the
     collective unconscious: the level of myth images, the Self level,
     and the level of the instincts or "inborn releasing
     mechanisms'[2]:


          Personal Psyche      ego consciousness
                               personal unconscious

                               mythic images
          Collective Psyche    Self
                               instincts (inborn releasing mechanisms)


          Lovers who have drunk the love potion relate to one another
     from the level of Self. This means that each feels complete and
     united within; they feel united with one another; and they feel
     one with the whole world. Thus Bedier says of Tristan and Isolde
     when they are living together in the forest that they were lords
     of the woods (73) and that Tristan could call the birds so that
     they would fly into their hut and sing for them (72). Tristan and
     Isolde could speak to one another in birdsong (97) just as Layla
     and Majnun were kept in touch during their separation by birds.
     Rumi, too, describes this condition:

            Lord, the air smells good today,
            straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God.

            . . . Face to face with a lion, I grow leonine.
            Walking out of the Treasury Building, I feel generous.
            Anyone still sober in this weather must be afraid
            of people, afraid what they'll say.
            Enough talking. If we eat too much greenery,
            we're going to smell like vegetables
                                                           (Rumi, 29).

          Such unity, such participation mystique (to use Jung's
     expression, borrowed from anthropologist Levy-Bruhl[3]) not
     infrequently is attended by so-called "psi" phenomena. Lovers read
     one another's minds quite commonly when they are joined at the
     level of Self. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy has the lovers, Kitty and
     Levin communicating at a chalk board by writing only the initial
     letters of words. Thus, the letters iycfafwh would be immediately
     understood to mean, "If you could forget and forgive what
     happened" (423). It works as a literary device because we know it
     is plausible -- or nearly so. Things of this type are exceptional,
     but they really happen. For Jung, they do not imply anything
     supranormal. They are part of nature, although not usually
     apparent:

          I therefore think it would be advisable to consider
          Psi-phenomena in the first place as sua sponte facts and
          not as supranormal perceptions. . . . Most of the cases
          of Psi-perception are due to the presence of a
          constellated archetype, which produces an abaissement du
          niveau mental (numinosity, emotion) (1975ii: 542f).

          Specifically, mentality is lowered to the level of the Self,
     too primitive a level for the reflective activity of imagery, much
     less words. It may be experienced as a paradisal state of egoless
     unity or a prison of non-identity. In the former case, we speak of
     the delights of the love potion and in the latter of a need for
     the sword of separation. Inwardly, we find ourselves whole and
     complete. Outwardly, we are united with our beloved and the whole
     universe as well.

          Such phenomena are not limited to the experience of lovers.
     By passing into an ecstatic trance, the shaman accesses this same
     state of unity with nature and with the patient. In Eliade's
     words, "The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he
     alone `sees' it, for he knows its `form' and its destiny" (8). The
     shaman's calling, talents, and training provide access to
     virtually all human souls, while the lover has access primarily
     only to the soul of the beloved. In both cases the access is the
     same, i.e., through the Self-level of the psyche. The shaman has
     learned to gain this access, this "lowering of the mental level,"
     deliberately and on conscious demand, whereas the lover does so
     passively as a result of the experience of falling deeply in love.
     For it is not all lovers who have this access, only those whose
     love has attained such depth that we can truly say of them that
     they have drunk the potion.

          The shaman sees the condition of the patient's soul to
     diagnose illness and particularly perceives its absence in truly
     life-threatening diseases, often of psychological origin. For
     example, Marjorie Shostak tells the story of the shamanic healing
     of a young !Kung woman near death in her struggle with malaria.
     The dangerous element in her condition appeared to be
     psychological, namely the recent death of her father. The shaman
     went into trance, and his soul made an exploratory journey to the
     world of the dead, where he found the spirit of the sick woman
     tenderly enfolded in the arms of her father who was rocking her
     and singing to her. The shaman addressed the father, asking why
     the daughter was in the land of the dead instead of with the
     living, where she belonged. The father said he had been desolate
     without her, whereupon the shaman argued passionately for her
     return to the obligations of life, saying that she would rejoin
     her father after she had experienced what life had to offer and
     had grown old. Finally the dead man's soul agreed to these terms.
     The shaman brought back the woman's soul, and she recovered
     (291f).

          Unlike most of the cultures Eliade reviews in his classic
     book on shamanism, the !Kung do not reserve shamanic powers to a
     small elite of practitioners. They believe -- and it is evidently
     the case -- that every man and woman possesses and has access to
     the shamanic healing force they call n/um. Some, of course, are
     more skilled than others in using it. N/um is usually dormant and
     must be activated by a deliberate "lowering of the mental level"
     through music, and especially though a strenuous trance dance
     which may go on for hours. This is their way of reaching the
     psychic level of Self which lovers attain through their erotic
     participation mystique.

          This connection, which the !Kung point to with the notion of
     n/um and I describe with the psychological metaphor of Self-level,
     Jung (1952/55) sometimes calls "unconscious a prioi knowledge" and
     "absolute knowledge." The shaman somehow "knows" the nature of the
     patient's illness and what to do about it, but it is not very much
     like the knowledge we attain with thought. We might say he "knows
     with his body," the expression Carlos Castaneda attributes to the
     Yaqui Indian shaman he calls don Juan Matus (1972, 1987). The
     lover "knows" the beloved in much the same way. Thus Tolstoy says
     of Kitty and Levin, "Through her love she knew his whole soul"
     (433). It is not a knowledge which can be reduced to words or
     images. Indeed, it might as well be called a "being" as a
     "knowing." That is why Cathy Earnshaw says, "I am Heathcliff" and
     Majnun calls himself the veil underneath which is the face of
     Layla (Nizami 1966: 125). Very likely it is similar to what the
     evangelist meant when he has Jesus say, "I and the Father are one"
     (John 10:30).

          The shamanic and love-potion connection between people can
     also be expressed by the metaphor of seeing. Lovers say they "see"
     into one another's hearts or souls. The shaman "looks for" the
     patient's soul when it is "lost"; he "sees" the condition of the
     soul's strength and health. In similar manner, I like to speak of
     the anima and animus serving as a "lens" whereby the lover brings
     into focus the soul or Self of the beloved, as well as his or her
     own. This "seeing" bears as little resemblance to sight as n/um
     "knowing" to a bachelor's degree. For Castaneda, "seeing" is the
     primary metaphor for shamanic activity; and as one reads through
     the eight autobiographical volumes chronicling his apprenticeship,
     one finds the connotations of the word seeing gradually but
     steadily reduced and simplified. As Castaneda begins to experience
     for himself what don Juan has been trying to describe for him, he
     starts to drop his expectations and presumptions. The activity of
     "seeing" transcendent, non-bodily realities becomes less a
     fancied, radiant goal and more a tool of everyday living.

          The metaphor of "seeing" is particularly compelling because
     images are so closely related to an interpersonal connection at
     the level of Self. The !Kung shaman, for example, actually enters
     a kind of dreamscape when he goes in search of the woman's lost
     soul. It is not a private dream of exclusively personal
     significance for the shaman. Rather it has an "objective" quality
     about it. It is a dream about the Self-level connectedness of
     shaman and patient. He obtains a true (because effective) insight
     into the psychological condition of the woman. She no longer wants
     to go on living; she would rather be with her father in the land
     of the dead. But she does not experience this as an attitude of
     her own. For her, it is the "pull" her absent father exerts which
     draws her out of life and dissolves her interest in the affairs of
     the living.

          Upon activating his n/um, the shaman first experiences these
     facts in an direct, imageless intuition. This is connection at the
     psychic level of Self. At this point he has a non-specific grasp
     of the seriousness of the woman's condition, which he expresses by
     saying that her soul is "lost." He does not know quite "where" it
     is or what is "detaining" it. In order to describe her condition
     more specifically, he needs imagery and therefore sends his own
     soul on a "journey" into dreamscape. Having lowered his mental
     level to that of the Self in order to obtain an effective
     participation mystique with his patient, he now needs to rise to
     the level of mythic image where those deep, unarticulated
     interpersonal facts can be represented in a useful manner. The
     shaman's role in primitive societies is precisely this, to be able
     to control the level of his or her psyche's functioning so as to:
     (a) access the soul/Self of the patient and (b) articulate the
     condition of that soul in imagery which is redolent of
     transcendent cultural meanings and social consensus. Thus
     Levi-Strauss (1967: 193) says of another shamanic cure, "The
     shaman provides the sick woman with a language by means of which
     unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible psychic states can be
     immediately expressed."

          Elsa's dream of Lohengrin is a manifestation of this same
     mythic level of the psyche, as was the initial dream of an
     analysand of mine in which an angelic man bathed in a golden light
     protected her and gave her the task of raising a baby which was
     herself. She dreamt it the night before first meeting with me and
     told me that she knew I was the analyst she should work with
     because the man in the dream was me. This phenomenon manifested
     itself somewhat differently, however, in the case of the college
     professor who twice seemed to conjure his anima into bodily
     existence. He did not have a dream image of the woman. Instead he
     pasted together, as it were, a montage of his anima, culled from
     literary sources. The mythic image-level of his psyche expressed
     itself implicitly in the academic work which he believed was
     wholly conscious.

          Insofar as anima and animus images at the mythic level
     adequately reflect realities at the "deeper" level of Self, they
     are inherently true. They "feel" true, also, because they
     imaginatively represent central aspects of my psyche. Even when I
     have not yet made the acquaintance of these facets of my Self,
     they speak with the self-evident conviction of Plato's anamnesis,
     as though I am remembering essential matters from a pre-birth
     vision. As an image for the other half of the round being I
     originally was before time began, a vision of my anima presents me
     with a hitherto unknown part of my Self.

          Such is surely the case with Elsa. Her vision of Lohengrin
     proceeds from her Self. It is true and in harmony with God's will.
     Lohengrin's defeat of Telramund in the Gottesgericht duel is
     merely secondary evidence for the centrality of Lohengrin in her
     psyche. Still she doubts, and it is important that she do so. She
     is a naive, dreamy young girl who can easily be led astray by
     peripheral concerns which only seem central. In fearing that
     Lohengrin may be a magician rather than an emissary of God (Gott
     gesanter Mann), Elsa entertains the possibility that the image of
     Lohengrin may have come from some shallower level of her psyche.

          That would be the level characterized by personal imagery, by
     the memories and repressed material from her own life history. The
     level of personal imagery is above all the "space" in the psyche
     where "outer" and "inner" issues mingle. Here, mythic images
     emerging from below are "clothed," as it were, in personal
     associations and take on an appearance peculiarly suited to each
     individual's past experience and future hopes. Here, too, we
     encounter imagery consciously and subliminally gathered from our
     environs. It is the reason fragments from televised beer
     commercials and science fiction movies find their way into our
     otherwise quite sober-seeming dreams.

          Elsa's doubt emerges from her awareness that she is lonely
     for companionship and understanding. She would love to have a
     knight-champion more angelically intimate and militarily powerful
     than any other. He would satisfy her deepest needs and justify her
     in the eyes of Brabant. Perhaps she has conjured him out of
     ego-centered desires. The magician works by precisely such means
     (cf. Gray, Bonewits, or Crowley): one determines the exact effects
     one wishes to bring about and then gathers intrapsychic emotional
     and image associations, amplifying them with mythic imagery and
     environmental effects. Having thus "mapped out one's own being"
     (Crowley, 12), one lowers the mental level with a powerful and
     focused emotion and "fires it" at the goal (Bonewits, 159). In
     short, the magician exploits the readily available imagery and
     desires of the personal level of the psyche to imitate the action
     of the archetype.

          All the several versions of the Turandot legend turn on this
     problem of center versus periphery or deep versus shallow. The
     hero Johannes in the Andersen version, cited above, has no doubts
     about himself or the princess once he has seen that she is the
     very woman he dreamed about. Nizami's (1959) hero is a bit more
     complex. The beautiful Princess Turandot has mastered all the
     ordinary arts and sciences and the occult arts as well. She builds
     a castle of iron and steel atop a mountain and has magic swords
     guard the single path which connects her with the rest of the
     world. She paints her likeness, life-sized, on a silk banner and
     hangs it from the gate of her father's city with the promise to
     marry any man who can disarm the swords, find his way into her
     castle with its hidden door, and answer a battery of riddles. The
     hero of this tale knows he has "lost his head" as soon as he sees
     Turandot's likeness. Unlike the others who suffered physical
     decapitation, however, he does not proceed immediately to the
     challenge. He deliberately chooses the sword of separation. He
     spends several years studying with the world's greatest gurus.
     This means that he familiarizes himself with his center. On this
     basis he succeeds.

          Turandot, herself, suffers from the same problem. She does
     not dare choose a husband, because she cannot trust her feeling or
     intuition to distinguish the center from the periphery. In
     Nizami's version of the tale, she has already fallen in love with
     the hero as soon as he enters her castle. But she does not show
     her emotion and coldly insists on the ordeal of the riddles. As I
     view the riddles, they are explicitly an attempt to test feelings
     -- to see if the feeling of being in love comes from the center or
     the periphery. Have they really drunk the love potion, or do they
     just wish they have?

          The riddles proceed as follows. She breaks an earring in two
     and gives him its two identical pearls. In answer, he adds three
     pearls of the same weight and gives the five to her. She grinds
     them to power, mixes in sugar and returns it to him. He pours the
     powder into a glass of milk and gives it to her. She drinks the
     sweetened milk and recovers the exact weight of pearl dust. She
     then sends him a ring. He puts it on his finger and sends her a
     "wonderful" pearl. She finds an identical one on her necklace,
     ties it to the first with a thread and returns it. He, unable to
     distinguish one from the other and not having a third, ties a
     glass marble to them. She puts the marble around her waist, hangs
     the pearls from her ears, and directs the wedding to be prepared.

          Her first gesture seems to say, "Our two souls are such a
     matched pair of jewels as these." She even believes this message,
     though it is tainted with her doubt. If he accepts it
     uncritically, she can throw handfuls of such pearls in his face
     and order his decapitation. The message is true but also a trick,
     as the pearls are anything but unique. She desperately wants to
     believe in love and the destiny of their two souls, but is afraid
     of falling for foolish romantic drivel. The first move in the game
     is to determine whether he is as soft-headed as she fears she is
     herself. None of this is lost on the prince, who keeps his wits,
     restrains his feelings, and shows he understands by adding three
     identical pearls of his own. In grinding the five pearls to
     powder, she reveals the aggressive desperation of her situation.
     She is nearly paralyzed by the fear of opening herself to a man
     who does not deserve her intimacy. She sugars the results of her
     violence. She is still testing whether he can discern the
     difference between sweet romance and hard reality.

          From the prince's side the message is slightly different; for
     in crushing both her own contribution and his, she threatens the
     five, the "quintessence" of their relationship. Unlike nuggets of
     gold, pearls cannot be reconstituted from dust; they have their
     value from the irreplaceable beauty of the whole. The sugaring of
     the dust suggests the threat of "sweet unconsciousness" which
     would result if he were to allow her to crush his individuality.
     In dissolving the sugar in milk, he invites her to enjoy the
     sweetness of their love. This answer is typical of his centered,
     Self-level replies. He accepts what she gives him for precisely
     what it is (two matching, valuable, but not unique pearls; a
     mixture of pearl-dust and sugar; etc.); but he transforms the
     meaning of the contributions. She tenders them in a fierce spirit
     of cynical mistrust. His careful acceptance widens the horizons of
     her suspicious world.

          Her next gesture, the ring -- by implication a wedding ring
     -- continues her obsessive self-distrusting queries: what will he
     do if I finally give myself to him? His answer, the truly
     "wonderful" pearl, symbolizes himself, the most valuable and
     unique gift he has. As she has one exactly like it, she repeats
     the opening gesture; but this time the pearls are really unique.
     The offer is genuine. It is typical of her self-deprecation that
     she disguise her offer of herself by first making several feints,
     as if to say, "Do you really value me; do you know what I'm giving
     you; are you ready to take me seriously?" She demands his total
     attention; she must be the center of his interests. She wants to
     remain eternally the darling princess and is terrified at the
     prospects of going on with her life, of becoming wife, queen, and
     mother. Her question also means, "Can you love me as I have never
     been able to love myself?"

          His answer of the glass bead shows his recognition that she
     has finally admitted her love, her belief that their two souls are
     unique, matching pearls. The bead seems to say: Alongside these
     pearls which are ourselves, all else is trash; there is no third.
     But it says more than this, for in giving her a worthless bauble,
     he also tells her he has seen her mean, petty, self-doubting side
     and accepts it, too. Her final gesture, hanging the bead from her
     waist, amounts to an acceptance of that in herself, an
     identification with the lowly piece of glass. This sentiment is
     repeated in the image, at once sexual and violent, with which she
     sums up the meaning of the riddles: "the falcon is enthroned on
     the breast of the pheasant."

          Both Turandot and Elsa have "stones in their pockets," but
     neither can quite trust her miraculous good fortune. Each attempts
     to solve the dilemma by examining her incarnated animus image. In
     a certain sense Elsa is more admirable in this, as she takes the
     risk of loss on her own head in demanding that Lohengrin identify
     himself. Turandot is much more cunning, desperate, and dangerous,
     but she accomplishes more. The two heroines are alike in that they
     have determined the connection with their lovers proceeds from the
     depth of the Self. The difference is that Elsa has built no
     foundation for an earthly life. She has, as it were, granted
     reality exclusively to the realm of the archetypes. This explains
     the ending of the opera, her sinking dis-en-souled to the earth,
     presumably to live bodilessly in the airy Kingdom of the Grail. In
     contrast, Turandot is brought down from her eagle's nest and will
     spend her life with her prince on the earthly, temporal plane.

          Elsa's solution, the denial of the personal and temporal in
     favor of the archetypal and eternal may be met with quite
     frequently in an analytic practice. It is the man or woman who
     avoids all personal involvement by living in a dream world with
     the ghostly image of an anima or animus. It is also the individual
     who sleeps with several different partners a week, frequently not
     even learning their names. These people use the physiology of sex
     to lower their mental level to a deep participation mystique and
     never integrate this experience with the personal level of the
     psyche.

          The personal level poses more of a challenge to the
     love-potion experience than the shallow distraction which Elsa and
     Turandot so desperately fear. It demands integration. This level
     of the psyche, which Jung calls the personal unconscious, is the
     bridge between ego consciousness and the deep unconscious. In our
     personal-image dreams and fantasies, a life-world is created. We
     imagine how our life might and might not be lived in the light of
     the mythic images arising from below and the environmental demands
     intruding from without. At this level mythic, generically human,
     issues are personalized, reduced to size, rendered in a form which
     we can recognize as our own. The myth becomes individualized and
     livable. Simultaneously, our personal perspective is broadened and
     rooted in the deep psychic matrix which has seen thousands of
     generations dealing with the same set of problems. Our life
     becomes connected with the divine images which inform it with
     transcendent meaning. Turandot's loss to the guru-apprentice
     prince turns out to be a two-fold gain. She learns to trust her
     feeling connection with the deep Self level of the psyche, and she
     lays the groundwork for integrating this with everyday life.

          Giacomo Puccini recognized the necessity of integrating
     objective and personal levels in his operatic version of the
     Turandot legend. He has the prince demand a task of her, namely to
     discover his name. In contrast to Wagner's Lohengrin, who tries to
     hide behind the numinous aura of his animus origins, Puccini's
     Calaf asks Turandot herself to penetrate the glow of
     transcendence. In his directions to his librettist, he says:

          [The love duet in Act II, scene 1] must be a great duet.
          The two beings [Turandot and Calaf] who stand, as it
          were, outside the world, are transmuted into human
          beings through love, and this love must take possession
          of everything on the stage.

          This integration is the master stroke in romantic love. It is
     no small matter to have a distinct vision of the anima or animus.
     It is genuinely marvelous when this angelic image can be conjured
     into bodily existence and related to. One may not ever expect to
     have "stones in the pocket." But to build something with those
     stones, that is what truly transforms a person. It is also the
     only act of the drama in which consciousness plays a major role.
     To have the image and even to conjure it into bodily existence, is
     an "act of grace," an unmerited boon from God. But to make it
     one's own, to find a way to live it, requires deliberate choice,
     resolution, judgment, and will.

          Integrating the levels of personal image, mythic image, and
     Self in an episode of romantic love is a metaphor closely related
     to three others which have already been discussed: withdrawing the
     projection, using anima as a lens, and becoming Layla. In
     withdrawing the projection, I relinquish my clinging to my
     external beloved and recognize her image within me. Through this
     inner image, as through a lens, I bring into a kind of pre-image
     focus of feeling or intuition or "body knowledge" the deeper Self
     whence the anima or animus image has emerged. And because I do not
     merely gaze at this image but integrate it into a way of life, I
     become the veil before the face of my true being -- my Layla.



     ----------------------

       1. Turandot is a fairy tale by Nizami (1959) and an opera by
          Puccini. Variations appear in many traditions, including "The
          Bewitched Princess" (Zaunert) and "The Traveling Companion"
          (Anderson).

       2. This differentiation of the collective unconscious is
          inspired by the later writings of Pierre Janet, where he
          develops a model of the psyche with nine levels, three of
          which cover the ground Jung includes in the term archetype. A
          careful reading of Jung (cf. Haule, 1984) will reveal his
          indebtedness to Janet's psychology to be about equally as
          great as to Freud's. However, he appears not to have read
          beyond Janet (1903), where the doctrine of the mental levels
          is first introduced. It is my belief that developments in
          Janet's psychology between the late 1920's and the end of his
          life can contribute valuably to Jung's thought while
          remaining within the spirit and conceptual framework of
          Jung's writings. Consult Haule (1983) for an exposition of
          these categories in language closer to that of Janet and
          applied to Jungian clinical practice. There is not much
          available in English on the psychology of Janet, but
          Ellenberger (386-94) presents an extensive summary of the
          nine mental levels Janet describes in his writings after
          1920. For the English-speaking reader not ready to tackle
          Janet's straight-forward declarative French, the two volumes
          of Psychological Healing (1919) are an excellent place to
          begin, although these were written before the "grand
          synthesis" of nine mental levels had been developed.

       3. Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939) argued that "primitive
          mentality" was characterized by, among other things, a lack
          of individual autonomy. Egohood was diminished to the
          advantage of social cohesion. There was no urge to autonomy,
          as the member gained primary satisfaction from mystically
          participating in the group. Jung applies the term
          participation mystique to describe any occurrence of this
          ecstatic relinquishment of consciousness between individuals.
          It need by no means be a pleasurable experience, for any
          overwhelming emotion between two or more people is capable of
          becoming an instance of participation mystique. "Mob
          psychology" would be a particularly abhorrent example.