Eros and Strife

CHAPTER TWELVE -

~ In the Wake of Poseidon ~

Nothing in excess.

- the other Inscription on the temple to Apollo at Delphi

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."

- Niels Bohr

"Neither Being nor Non-being
neither air nor earth nor space:
what was enclosed? where?
under whose protection?
What was water, deep, unfathomable?
Neither death nor immortality, day nor night--
but ONE breathed by itself with no wind.
Nothing else. Darkness swathed in darkness, unmanifest water.
The ONE, hidden by void,
felt the generation of heat, came into being
as Desire, first seed of Mind..."

- Rig Veda

"Before the beginning was Eros: blind hunger, primordial urge, formless power, undirected desire, aimless energy, voracious craving, unorganized activity: Boundless Creativity."

- God, Trinity and Creation
God as Masculine and Feminine

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Eros and Strife | pg. 2 - Peace: A Beginning | pg. 3 - Pictures of a City
pg. 4 - Cadence and Cascade | pg. 5 - In the Wake of Poseidon I | pg. 6 - In the Wake of Poseidon II
pg. 7 - Cat Food | pg. 8 - The Devil's Triangle | pg. 9 - Garden of Worm
pg. 10 - Peace: An End

- page index -
Eros | Temperance | Eros and Strife

site index

Translate from

"The next step is the division into TWO. Thus was manifested the Great Dual Power of Nature. As above, so below.

The Dual Power of Nature is the Great Mother of the Worlds.

Again, to draw an analogy from the Material World, consider the Moon, our Mother. Behold in her the Typic representative of the Powers of the Two. Light and Darkness, Flux and Reflux, Ebb and Flow --- these are her manifested Powers in Nature --- where also she binds the "Great Waters" to her Will."

- A Note on Genesis

"Poseidon was originally a female Posidaeja in Minoan civilization, which recognized no male symbol of the sea."

- Calypso and Circe

"Poseidon's nature emphasises the element of water manifesting through the deep unconscious and the strong emotions. The fact that his kingdoms were subject to the ultimate authority of Zeus, lord of air, seems to be the Greek way of saying that intellect is a stronger force than emotion."

- Temple of the Sacred Spiral

n keeping with the Temperance theme of the album, Poseidon inhabits the "middle ground" between the sky/heaven (Zeus) and the underworld (Pluto).

"Neptune (Poseidon) is between Zeus and Pluto, a middle and not an extreme."

- The Orphic Pantheon

TWO

"Represents duality. Alteration; diversity; conflict; dependence. Two is a static condition. It is rooted, seen as balance (two sides); stability; reflection. Two are the opposite poles. Represents the dual nature of the human being. It is desire, since all that is manifest in duality is in pairs of opposites. The Binary is the first number to recede from Unity, it also symbolizes sin which deviates from the first good and denotes the transitory and the corruptible."

- Numerology

"If One represents the principle of Unity from which all things arise, then Two, the Dyad, represents Duality, the beginning of multiplicity, the beginning of strife."

- Differentiation and Integration

"When once the Primal Simplicity diversified, Different names appeared."

- Lao Tzu
Tao Teh Ching

On the album cover, the twelve archetypes represent multiplicity.

"The Kabbalists affirm that a form of multiplicity is an important stage in the process of personal and world redemption. The archetypal images that constitute the self are many and we cannot and should not strive for a premature integration. The entire Kabbalah affirms the unity of God (and hence the self) but only in the context of a "one in many". According to Lurianic and Hasidic teaching, it is the fundamental divine purpose that the world should be differentiated and revealed in a vast array of finite particulars before being united and completed in a single infinite source (Elior, 1987, p. 156). "

- The Lurianic Kabbalah: An Archetypal Interpretaion
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D.

The pairs of archetypes on the front cover (i.e. Kore, the virgin, and Persephone [top,] Dionysus and Demeter [center], Hades and Hermes, the Yellow Jester [bottom]) represent the Dyad, duality.

The cover painting also follows directly from the the end of the previous album. Or put another way, the last thing revealed in the previous album is the first thing we see about the second album. As the Crimson King learned in The Dance of the Puppets ...

"...we and our parents are puppets in an archetypal drama, manipulated by giant figures operating above and behind our conscious awareness."

Jung and Tarot, an Archetypal Journey
by Sallie Nichols

The archetypes of the collective unconscious are these "giant figures".

return to page index
site index

In The Dance of the Puppets Dionysus, the son of Zeus, the divine child, appeared and overturned the previous order, liberating the psyche. This role as "Liberator" was one that he shared with two other gods, his father, Zeus, and Eros.

"Three gods in the ancient Hellenic pantheon, Zeus, Dionysus, and Eros held the esoteric surname Eleutherios, meaning "the Liberator" (root eleuthera, "free"). Zeus ("Bright-Day") Eleutherios was the keeper of liberty, armies of liberation knew his lightning bolts would be their ally, within and without. Mystics spoke of the liberation of Zeus as the inextinguishable brightness beyond the underworld. Dionysus Eleutherios bequeathed "his favor" through free feeling, ecstasy, and celebration. Eros Eleutherios shot his arrows through the hearts of lovers and the liberation of love was given. And he married the earthbound Psyche before Zeus Himself, whose ambrosia gave her immortality. These gods of Brightness, ecstasy, and love each describe the divinity which grants freedom."

- Acknowledgements: The Trail of Eleutherios

"In the traditional view, it is the magnetic pull of Eros which inspires the electron to desire the proton, lovers to desire conjugal union, and the soul of the mystic to desire union with the ineffable source of creation.

The idea of love as a cosmic force first appears in the creation myth of Orphism, a Greek mystical movement named after Orpheus, the legendary musician and theologian. In the Orphic creation story, black-winged Night was impregnated by the Wind, and laid a silver egg in the heart of darkness. From the cosmic egg hatched the primordial, winged Eros, who was also known as Protogonos (First-born) and Phanes (Manifestor of Light). In the Orphic myth, radiant Eros is the first-born source of the entire universe. Heaven and Earth are his offspring, as are the Gods and humanity. In Orphism, as in the later teachings of Christianity, the source of creation is defined as Love."

- Eros and the Circle of Divine Love

This brings up an important point regarding the change in attitude from the first album to the second. While In the Court of the Crimson King could be described as dark and menacing, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a decidedly kinder and gentler Crimson King. There is a reason for this. In album one Eros is repressed, unconscious.

"An unconscious Eros always expresses itself as will to power."

- C. G. Jung,
Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype

Album one expresses the Promethean Will to Power and this is not overcome until the end of the album, when Eros, or Love, is released from its prison in the unconscious.

"Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking."

- C. G. Jung,
The Problem of the Attitude-Type

But this does not mean that album number two is all sweetness and light. There is also a dark side to Eros.

"Eros brings beauty, meaning and divinity into our lives. It comes to us through a very particular epiphany, a passionate inspiration present in a particular lover, teacher, melody, or landscape. We long to follow it always. But this is not the whole story. For eros also brings us obsessions, cruelty, abandonment, and betrayal."

- The Other: Loveliness by Harriet Eisman

"Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so . . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony."

- C.G. Jung, The Eros Theory

And this dual nature of Eros is also characteristic of the archetypes.

"In the ancient past, when these powers of the archetypes over the human will were intensely dramatic, or negative, this phenomenon was termed "possession," and it could be demonic or spiritual in nature."

- Pantheon: Archetypal Godforms in Daily Life

"Beside the field of reflection
there is another equally broad if not
broader area in which rational understanding
and rational modes of representation find
scarcely anything they are able to grasp. This
is the realm of Eros. In classical times,
when such things were properly
understood, Eros was considered a god
whose divinity transcended our human
limits, and who therefore could neither
be comprehended nor represented in
any way. I might, as many before me
have attempted to do, venture an
approach to this daemon, whose range
of activity extends from the endless spaces
of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell;
but I falter before the task of finding the
language which might adequately express
the incalculable paradoxes of love.
Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and
father-mother of a higher consciousness.
I sometimes feel that Paul's words -

' 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,
and have not love'

- might well be the first condition of all cognition
and the quintessence of divinity itself"

"Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole.
He is at its mercy. He may assent to it,
or rebel against it; but he is always
caught up by it and enclosed within it.
He is dependent upon it and is
sustained by it. Love is his fight and
his darkness, whose end he cannot see."

- Jung 1963, pg. 386

"I've been here"

"from the endless spaces of the heavens..."

"And I've been there"

"to the dark abysses of hell"

"And I've been in between."

"Desire is love that contains fear and there is always an ego (Eros) attached. The arrows that the winged (angel archetype) child god of love, Eros, shoots were the arrows of desire or ego love. Fear is the real opposite of agape love. Desire is analogous with love that contains fear, for desire is the perception of a lack of something, namely Paradise, that place where both kinds of love were experienced as one. As Emily Dickinson said: "This is all there is," two kinds of love and two kinds of consciousness: ego love and soul love. I perceive these as the two sides of the feeling function.
The destiny of the newborn infant crying a first cry in the nursery, the destiny of all living beings, is to live out both sides of love and come to the realization that he or she was that all along. There are only two beginning sides to the feeling function in the psyche: "I desire" and "I do not desire," and both of them are love.
It was the wise woman, Diotima (Plato, 1928, p. 369), who describes yet another version of the birth of Eros; he is the child of Porus (Plenty) and Penia (Poverty), and he is born on Aphrodite's birthday. This metaphor appears to fit the description of desire most accurately, for it includes the double nature of Eros, who is more than the description of "exuberance and delight" (Ponce, 1991, p. 3). Eros (or ego love) can also mean pain and suffering; he was feared by the gods; even his father, Zeus, admonishes and blames him for his many affairs (Neumann, 1952/1956, p. 51)"

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

return to page index
site index

For every good thing to be said about Eros, or the unconscious, there is also a negative. It is possible to constellate too far to the other side, to disregard Thinking and operate primarily from the Feeling function. The first two albums are like bookends, one is incomplete without the other and addressing the problems of only one psychological function will simply allow the other function to dominate. In order to achieve balance, both functions need to be addressed.

The protagonist in the Sinfield albums, is in a great sense, regressing in order to move forward. In the second album he addresses the phenomenon immediately behind the split in the psychological functions: desire, the negative side of the Feeling function. With the illusion of duality, (subject and object, the individual and what he desires) comes the birth of desire. When desire has been negated or neutralized a new consciousness will emerge.

"The children follow,
not knowing the taste of wine, or how
His drunkness feels. All people on this planet
are children, except for a very few.
No one is grown up except those free of desire."

- Rumi

Album one addressed the problem of the differentiated Thinking function and presented a process by which the protagonist discovered his heart.
In album two, the problems of the recently accessed Feeling function are addressed, specifically, the "I desire" aspect of Eros. The protagonist's task in the second album is to temper the extremes of his newly discovered feelings and, in so doing, find a balance between Thinking and Feeling, Logos and Eros. In order to accomplish these tasks, the Feeling function must be submitted to the same dialectical process applied to the Thinking function in album one. Remember the album's temperance theme.

"The two vessels held by Temperance are connected by the flow of feeling, and this trump emphasizes the feeling function of consciousness,"

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

"What Jung was really getting at was two basic principles, each with its own way of determining psychic processes. The first is Eros, the principle of relatedness (what Jung liked to characterize as "feminine"). The second is Logos, which is not quite so easy to define in one word, but it has to do with formally structured conceptualization. Under the influence of Eros are all the more or less dream-like states of consciousness, spontaneous fantasy, and thinking which is driven by affects. Logos, in contrast, produces what Jung called "directed thinking", thinking in words. Sooner or later, the creative person has to answer to both Eros and Logos. But the two tend to pull us in opposite directions."

- Nourishing the Imagination

return to page index
site index

The album's tracks fluctuate between the states of "I do not desire" and "I desire" which could be said to correspond to Eros and Thanatos (Freud's twin "basic instincts" of love and death), the Empedoclean idea of Eros and Strife and to Klein's depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions.

"Empedocles explained that there are two great living forces in the universe, which he called Love (Philot�s) and Strife (Neikos) and assigned to Aphrodite and Ares. According to Hesiod, the Goddess Love and the God Strife, offspring of Night (Nux), were ancient deities, predating the Olympians. The original golden age was the Reign of Aphrodite, when all things were united and Love permeated the length and breadth of the well-rounded cosmic sphere. But Strife, as the River Styx surrounding the Sphere, broke its Unity, and cleaved the One into Many. It divided the four elements, which ever since combine and separate under the opposing actions of Love and Strife to produce the changing world with its manifold objects and qualities. As Heraclitus said, "Through Strife all things come into being." Empedocles said that Strife also divided the one immortal soul of Love into many individual souls, each comprising both Love and Strife in some proportion; these immortal souls are reborn time and again into mortal bodies, which are animated by mortal souls compounded from the four elements."

- Exercise for Unity by Apollonius Sophistes

On the album cover, the duality of "eros and strife" is represented by Dionysus and Demeter.

Dionysus and Demeter

"ZEUS prophesied: My son, bringer of a glorious gift, shall plant in the earth the most fragrant fruit of vintage the Allheal my son Dionysus Alljoy will cherish the no-sorrow grape..."

- Dionysus, Welcome Home

"...she caused a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind over the all-nourishing earth: the ground would not make the seed sprout, for rich-crowned Demeter kept it hid. In the fields the oxen drew many a curved plough in vain, and much white barley was cast upon the land without avail. So she would have destroyed the whole race of man with cruel famine..."

- Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Eros / "I Do Not Desire"	Strife / "I Desire"
1) Peace: A Beginning	2) Pictures of A City
3) Cadence and Cascade	4) In the Wake of Posiedon
5) Peace: A Theme	6) Cat Food
7) Merday Morn	8) Hand of Sceiron
9) Garden of Worm	9) Garden of Worm

10) Peace: An End

"Everything flows and nothing abides: everything gives way and nothing stays fixed."

- Heraclitus

"Water is the element of purification, the unconscious mind, love and the emotions.

Just as water is fluid, constantly changing, flowing, from one level to another, so too are our emotions in a constant state of flux.

Water is the element of absorption and germination. The unconscious is symbolized by this element because it is rolling, always moving, like the sea which rests neither night or day."

- Correspondences

And, emphasizing the dual nature of Eros throughout the album, the psyche of our protagonist is "in a state of flux; constantly changing, flowing from one level to another. ...rolling, always moving, like the sea which rests neither night or day."

return to
chapter & page index

Sign the Dreambook Read the Dreambook

Works

Lyrics
&
Poems

Gallery

Guestbook
Archive

Links

Discography

E-mail:
Peter Sinfield
Jon Green

Page One

Return to the Song Soup On Sea Homepage