by May, Rollo
Sylvia explained that the woman “heard” the order by a kind of telepathy, and then she would move automatically to fill it. From the angle of the Briar Rose motif, the dream is exceedingly enlightening. The woman now earns her admiration, her identity by being so efficient, picking out of the air the order someone gives at the other end of the room.
The dream seems to be saying that at last the woman finds her unique contribution, her special ability, her uniquely feminine aspect of the relationship with a man. Perhaps due to their biological role in bearing and understanding children, women are often better at telepathic ways of communicating than men. This dream salutes the fact that Sylvia is now finding her own abilities, her own unique capacities as a woman. She also points out that the woman is an author. The dream is a mark of genuine human progress, and I silently cheered.
In the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, the adolescent is one who never adolesces, the person who wants to be awakened without ever awakening herself or himself. This has a parallel in the togetherness of premature “going steady” that characterizes the social life of many young people. Too soon they become sources of presence for each other, and it thus becomes a presence without content. A premature awakening sexually means that sex can be used in the service of avoiding an awakening on all other levels of the self. We—adolescent or adult—often hurry into sex to avoid confronting the meaning of the relationship. Togetherness then consists of truncated development that is pegged at a partial level; part of the girl and young man remaining unawakened. If one’s awakening consists of knowing only a single person—and now we are speaking particularly of adolescents—one will likely have an undeveloped and truncated perspective on the rest of the human world.
REVISITING BRIAR ROSE
We must ask what happens with this Sleeping Beauty tale now that we’ve turned it into a myth? If Ibsen were to write it, or Arthur Miller, what would it be? There is a story, for which we are indebted to Theodore Reik, about the finding of a little piece of manuscript after the bombing of a German city during the last war. The manuscript was badly damaged, and the one page of it that remained was only barely legible. But it purported to be the final page of the fairy tale of Briar Rose. It went like this:
… and they lived happily ever after. Some months passed by and the king’s son began to feel restless and bored. He wanted to leave the castle in search of new adventures. There must be, he thought, other sleeping beauties he could awaken with a kiss. And he imagined how they would open their eyes—which he imagined as being sometimes blue, sometimes hazel, or dark brown—and look at him sweetly. One day when he was walking about the castle ground he noticed that what used to be a wall of flowers was now again a hedge of thorns so high and so thick that he couldn’t work his way through it. Every day after that he slipped out of the castle by a side entrance and tried to find some opening in the hedge. Every day the hedge grew thicker and higher. He took a sword and tried to hack his way through, but the thorns held fast together as if they had hands.
At last the young prince gave up and returned to his wife Briar Rose. She told him all about her troubles with the cook and the kitchen maid, and what the butler had said to the laundress and what the laundress answered, and what she herself had wanted to say to the chambermaid, but didn’t.
While she was talking, the eyelids of the young prince grew heavier and heavier, and, in spite of all that his wife and the courtiers could do to prevent it, he fell into a sleep that lasted a hundred years.
That was Theodore Reik’s answer to the conclusion of this myth-tale. There is no reason why one cannot write one’s own:
… and they lived happily for a couple of years. But increasingly the queen began to feel bored by the enclosed life of the castle. No one went out of the castle yard and almost the only people who came in were delivery men.
As she was walking around the castle one morning, she began to think of these other men who had stormed the castle in the old tales about her being asleep, and she wondered how and who they were. It was only a falsehood that they had been killed; she knew many were still alive, one or two in the village below, others throughout the land. So she pulled on her slacks and sweater and strolled down to the village, where she met one of them in the bar. He had become a writer of fairy tales and had traveled all over the country, and he interested her greatly. So she went back to the castle and summoned the gardener. “Cut down all this hedge,” she said, “And let’s have a lawn that stretches all the way down to the village. I’m tired of being cooped up here!”
In the village she found a painter who, strange to say, turned out to be one of her erstwhile suitors. So she took several lessons from him and found to her delight that she had a great deal of talent. She had exhibits in the village town hall, and there were two others of the old suitors, whom she met. One of them turned out to be a master piano player, so she instituted afternoon soirees and invited all her friends from the village to the palace to hear the music.
One day at her musical soiree the king came in and sat down in the back row. But just as the pianist was doing a Chopin nocturne, the king began to nod and soon he was fast asleep and snoring!
The queen saw him and laughed to herself, “Thank God I got out of this cage!”
TWELVE
Faust: The Myth of Patriarchal Power
Today we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere aesthetically pleasing mode of representing something to one’s self, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every comer of the waking consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. … [Myths] were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. … In the old days men did not “enjoy myth.” Behind it stood Death.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2
THE POWERFUL MYTH of Faust fit the deep psychological and spiritual needs of Europeans in the radical transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation. Faust became the mythic narration for the Northern peoples. A number of versions of the myth were written: Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, published in 1591; Goethe’s Faust, the first half published when Goethe was forty and the second when he was eighty, in 1832. During World War II, Thomas Mann wrote his version, Dr. Faustus, published in 1947. In addition the myth has been spread far and wide through opera, philosophy, and creative writings of all sorts. Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a musical rendition of the Faust legend. The Great Gatsby is itself a Faust-like novel. Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster is another example, as is The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the musical Damn Yankees.
“It is depressing,” writes Rene Dubos, in his contemporary book The God Within, “that the only myth the modern age has contributed to civilization is that of Faust.”* But the most powerful contemporary demonstration of the significance of the Faust dramas is given by Oswald Spengler in his classical work The Decline of the West, published in 1918, the year World War I ended. With his encyclopedic mind, Spengler compares other cultures, such as the Persian and Arabic, with our modem Western culture, using the contrast of Apollonian and Faustian as his categories. Coming from the Greek myth of Apollo, the Apollonian stands for cultures characterized by reason, harmony, balance, and justice. The symbol for Apollonianism is the circle.
The symbol for Faustianism, on the contrary, is the straight line, always moving ahead in progress, which is our contemporary belief. But our dilemma is that progress applies only to technical things—we invent better automobiles, electric dishwashers, and nuclear bombs. The concept of progress does not hold in spiritual and aesthetic realms, such as religion, philosophy, art, and literature, all of which thrive in the classical Apollonian ages. Spengler argued that the West (meaning chiefly Europe and America) is Faustian in our great love of competition and our overweaning materialism.
Spengler’s book was greeted with immedia
te horror and rebuttals on all sides. But if he had lived through World War II, the dropping of the atom bomb, and the use of the nuclear bomb to obliterate Nagasaki, he would have made his Faustian emphasis in the West even more emphatic!
Our existence in the nuclear age, with our arsenals filled with nuclear warheads, makes ours a Faustian age in the extreme. Where previous ages have only knocked on the door of the mystery, we have broken into the building itself. Will our ending be self-chosen destruction like Marlowe’s Faust? Or will we experience some deus ex machina, like Goethe’s Faust, and be given the chance to repent before the fatal bell tolls at midnight?
Nuclear physicists are well aware of the dangers that they have helped to discover. Dr. Hans Bethe at Cornell has talked of the catastrophic Faustian danger we face. When the director of the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, needed to find a term to describe the dangers of our predicament with respect to nuclear arms, he seized upon the myth of Faust. Pondering our warheads and the dismal fact that we are able to blow up most of the globe in one hour, or cause a perpetual nuclear winter, plus the great difficulty in the disposal of nuclear waste, which threatens to contaminate much of our land for future generations, Dr. Weinberg pondered Faust’s experience. His article, “Our Faustian Bargain,” comes to the conclusion that our only possible answer is “eternal vigilance.”* We can indeed understand what Spengler means when he says that “behind the myth stands death.”
THE FAUST STORY
Some changes of great psychological and spiritual significance occurred in the fifteenth century, which marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. We can see this most vividly by comparing Dante’s Divine Comedy with the myth which was to come in the Renaissance, namely, Faust. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy as an expression of the struggle through hell, purgatory, and finally to paradise to achieve ultimate blessedness in the peak of Divine Love. There is in Dante’s writing a serenity, a sense of faith, divine blessing, and pure love. All these are mediated by Beatrice, a figure who reconciled these great capacities with what had been taught by the Church at its best.
In medieval times the Church held women in high esteem. Mary, the Mother of God, made up the triangle with God and the Christ and was adored in the Middle Ages in countless assignments of “Hail Mary’s.” Cathedrals like Notre Dame were named after women.
But in the Reformation in Germany and in England the trinity was changed to “God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.” And the luscious, colorful, even if sometimes gaudy Catholic churches were exchanged for the masculine severity—though still often beautiful—Protestant churches of the Reformation. It was a new world and the peasantry and burghers were filled with fright at this world and cried out for a new dominant myth.
Renaissance people were told by Mirandella that they as individuals had the power to make themselves into whatever they chose. And they had been instructed by Nicolaus Cusanos early in the fifteenth century that each person had the center of the universe in himself. Many other spokesmen lauded the individual power of Renaissance individuals. Calvin and Luther were to tell them that they were free in religion, and Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo were showing them the movement of the stars. No wonder they felt spiritually uprooted and needed a new myth!
The myth which fit these excited people of the Renaissance was the narration of Faust. This was a man who was born in that spiritual and psychological maelstrom and who partook of that lust for knowledge to be gained by magic, since the new discoveries on every side seemed to the ordinary person to be magical. This mythic Faust would live out his lust for knowledge and his twenty-four years of voluptuous power on this earth, but he would do this by selling his immortal soul to Lucifer, after which he would suffer the tortures of hell for eternity. The myth must show this figure representing the hopes and fears of these citizens as Faust succeeds in his great aim to partake of divine power. The myth then must furnish a catharsis to assuage the citizen’s fears and guilt in Faust’s punishment at the conclusion of the twenty-four years of magical power.
The Faust myth began as the story of the exploits of a certain John Faustus, who actually lived in northern Germany in the mid-sixteenth century and spent his life in continual magical pranks on his fellow men. Some of his life was spent in jail, and he was reputed to have gone to hell when he died and there suffered eternal fire and brimstone. A pamphlet published in Germany in 1587, called the “Chapbook,” detailed the sins of this Faustus, including his alleged sexual intercourse with Helen of Troy, which was believed to doom a man forever to hell. Entitled “The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus,” this booklet caught on like wildfire at the end of the Middle Ages and was made into a traveling morality play. It united the yearning for new knowledge (which often seemed magical in reality) with guilt, punishment, and the dreaded fires of hell and eternal torture.
Regardless of their not understanding the language of the pamphlet, the people of Holland and Belgium could see the burning fires of hell and smell the flesh burning. They could experience the sense of doom and the catharsis they so desperately needed. They had seen copies of Bosch’s paintings of hell and damnation and those of Grunewald of the punishments of the dying. To watch this myth enacted and to hear the groans of the damned in eternal punishment was to experience their own conscious and subconscious fears. These fears were allayed by the catharsis of observing Faustus writhing and agonizing in his punishment. The vivid myth gave them a sense of vicarious penance. Faustus suffered before them and they were thus freed to accept what they perceived as the magic of their new age.
MARLOWE’S FAUST—GRANDEUR AND TRAGEDY
Christopher Marlowe, a Renaissance man in his own right, had a checkered career. He was born the same year as Shakespeare, 1564, studied for some time at Oxford, and was killed in a brawl when he was twenty-eight. But he wrote several dramas of great power, any one of which would have assured him of immortality. His The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus is written, as one critic states, with “terrifying beauty.”
As the drama opens we see Dr. Faustus, a respected professor, ruminating in his study on the great boredom of his life. Though he has degrees in medicine, philosophy, and theology, he is overpowered by his lust for vast, new, magical knowledge, a lust which was common in the Renaissance.
Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both law and physics are for petty wits,
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile;
“Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me!”*
Faustus especially castigates the subject that was most important in the Middle Ages, divinity, which is called “harsh, contemptible, and vile.” Like Icarus, writes Marlowe, is Faustus;
Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow!†
It is a myth of conscience, springing from the pride, greed, lust, and despair of a man which commit him to Eternal Darkness. He strives against the faith, against repentance or belief in God’s mercy and love, all of the things which give a person grace.
Faustus cries out as he plans to give himself up to Lucifer:
O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, and omnipotence
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command….
Faustus cannot accept being a mere man. He demands that he be like God, indeed that he be God.
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Couldst thou make men to live eternally
Of being dead, raise them to life again.*
So Faustus gives up his human status and tries to be God. He summons Mephistopheles and tells him of his decision to join the forces of Lucifer. In answer to Faustus’ question about his life before he w
as thrown into hell, Mephistopheles—the representative of the devil—answers with one of the most haunting passages of the drama:
… Think’st thou that I who saw the face of Cod
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?†
In this strange reversal of roles, the devil pleads with Faustus to forgo his plans to join Lucifer, the chief of the underworld. But Faustus is adamant and tells Mephistopheles to go back and “bear these tidings to great Lucifer,” so that Faustus, for “four and twenty years, will
live in all voluptuousness,
Having thee always to attend on me:
How great he will be!
… I’ll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge through the moving air
To pass the ocean with a band of men:
I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore
And make the country continent to Spain,
And both contributory to my crown.*
Thus Faustus will dominate both nature and man.
The hundreds of people who flocked to see this morality play, into which Marlowe’s myth was made, quivered at these words, aware on some level of consciousness that this was their secret desire as well. This new sense of power, control, omnipotence, the very rival of divinity, this vast power to change the boundaries of the world, gave them a fright along with a great sense of their power. For they were living in the new world of Copernicus and Galileo, and this lust for knowledge gave them new freedoms on every side. Living “in all voluptuousness” was profoundly tempting, and the height of evil at the same time.
The drama gives a continuous picture of Faustus struggling with the decision, shall he or shall he not? He then stabs his arm for blood to sign away his soul to Lucifer, but his body does not follow his aims—the blood is blocked: “My blood congeals and I can write no more.” And he rightly sees this as a psychosomatic sign,