Eros and Strife ~ The Devil's Triangle

CHAPTER TWELVE -

~ In the Wake of Poseidon ~

- 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

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Where Love Reigns | Merday Morn | Hand of Sceiron

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The Devil's Triangle

"What is opposed brings together: the finest harmony (harmonia) is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife."

- Heraclitus

"Truth is in conflict"

- Heraclitus

"What is this war in the heart of nature?
Why does nature vie with itself,
the land contend with the sea?
Is there an avenging power in nature,
not one power but two?"

- opening soliloquy, The Thin Red Line

"There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things."

- Empedocles 430 BC

"In every religion that recognizes a maternal deity fostering life there's a complementary figure standing for death, ending, rupture. Mother nature is both the giver of life and the taker of life, for there is no life without death."

- Shadow Feminism and the Reunion of Men and Women

The Actress

"Demeter is the Greek Goddess most closely associated with the Earth Mother. In fact, meter means "mother", and according to Adam McLean (The Triple Goddess, An Exploration of the Archetypal Feminine), the De was once Ge, Greek for "Earth" (as in geography, geology, and geometry). This would make it seem that perhaps Demeter is the oldest named Greek Goddess, and the Goddess closest to the original Earth Mother."

- The Greek Goddesses

When Demeter heard of the kidnapping of her only daughter, Persephone, she left Olympus and dwelt on Earth, disguising herself as an old crone, a "Lady Window Shopper".

"On the other hand, Barbara Walker (The Women's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects) associates the De in Demeter's name with the Greek letter D or Delta, which has the shape of the triangle. Walker makes the point that the delta or triangle is an ancient symbol of the female pubic triangle, and represents the womb of the Earth Mother."

- The Greek Goddesses

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The Devil's Triangle depicts the dual forces of Eros. One of these forces is conscious and the other is unleashed from the unconscious. Remember that "Poseidon was originally a female Posidaeja in Minoan civilization".

Poseidon in Greek mythology

"He is the god of the oceans and the archetype of the quest for redemption. Poseidon was the most primitive of the gods, the earth-shaker, the god of storms and earthquakes, of the sudden devastation of tidal waves, the dangers unleashed when the forces slumbering under the surface of consciousness erupt."

- Neptune

On their respective albums, The Devil's Triangle and The Dream The Illusion occupy the same position. In The Dream The Illusion , the protagonist discovered his higher nature resulting in the transcendent glory (the divine Logos) of the title track, The Court of the Crimson King . In The Devil's Triangle , the protagonist encounters his lower nature (fallen Eros), his shadow. Here, as with Cat Food , we see how album two, In the Wake of Poseidon is a mirror (a reversed image) of album one.
It is now time to ponder more of Jung's quote, "Where love reigns, there is no will to power".

"Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other: the man who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds his compensatory opposite in the will to power, and that of the man who puts the accent on power is Eros."

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

Love (Eros) was awakened at the end of the first album and so the protagonist of In the Wake of Poseidon , having adopted the standpoint of Eros, finds his "compensatory opposite" in the will to power. The will to power is his shadow. What was the shadow in the first album (Eros) comes to light in the second album. And what was in the light in the first album (the Will to Power) recedes into the shadow in the second album.

In this context, we can see the second album in its entirety (both stylistically and conceptually) as shadow and opposite of the first.

The "Night Sounds" of album one are dark and sinister. Peace: A Beginning is light and airy. Pictures of a City is a kinder gentler (tempered) version of 21st Century Schizoid Man . 21st Century Schizoid Man is primarily concerned with the will to power while Pictures of a City is primarily concerned with Fallen Eros. The protagonist is looking at the world in both songs. The world is unchanged from one album to the next but the protagonist sees the the world differently. His 'horizons change". Similarly, the will to power is expressed in I Talk to the Wind as resistance to change, sharing or communication, while Cadence and Cascade is about cooperation and play. "Cadence" and "Cascade" are equivalent to the "straight man" and the "late man" of I Talk to the Wind except that, instead of being at odds, they are now getting along with one another. In the Wake of Poseidon is a milder, less intense (tempered) amalgam of Epitaph and The Court of the Crimson King . It is a mirror image of both those songs. Epitaph and The Court of the Crimson King chronicle the errors of the Thinking function while In the Wake of Poseidon details errors of Feeling. At the same time, In the Wake of Poseidon , expresses the same deep concern for the human race found in Epitaph . As explained earlier, Cat Food is a mirror reflection (opposite) of Moonchild (its counterpart on album one).

All of the tracks on In the Wake of Poseidon are mirror reflections (feminine counterparts) of the songs on In the Court of the Crimson King . The album as a whole is a mirror reflection (feminine counterpart) of the first album. It is Yin to the Yang (Logos) of the Crimson King.

The most overt expression of the Will to Power in the first album, came at the very beginning: 21st Century Schizoid Man . The astrological sign of that song was Aries, Mars, the god of war (attended by Strife and Discord). This is why the Mars theme is used in The Devil's Triangle . The Devil's Triangle depicts the return of the repressed: the will to power synonymous with fallen Eros, "I desire", Freud's death instinct, Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and Strife.
Jung referred to the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time (over the course of the album) as "enantiodromia".

"I use the term enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

"When something has been accomplished, an opposition must be established before anything else can occur. You may hold a Christian ideal, but this is also impossible, for though a mind may be spirit, you cannot go endlessly into spirit, as you constellate the materialism of the unconscious. A living system is a self-regulating system and must be balanced. Neither spirit nor matter is good in themselves, for, in excess, both destroy life."

- Beyond the “Trigger Effect”: A Personal Note on the “Numinous Consciousness” by Robert Couteau

In the Court of the Crimson King our protagonist brought to consciousness some of the higher aspect of Eros. But because lower or fallen Eros remained in the shadow, the process of re-integrating Eros was not completed.
Ostensibly, Thinking and Feeling "married" in the first album, but, by the end of the second album, the honeymoon is definitely over. Now that he has gotten to know her, the groom (consciousness) no longer idealizes his bride (Eros) as the enchanting nymph of Moonchild . Lately, she seems more like one of the repulsive harvest hags of Cat Food .
The Crimson King seeks to "taste the sweet and the sour". In the first album he tastes the "sweet" (of Eros) and in the second album, the "sour".

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Merday Morn

"C.G. Jung and many other scientists in the fields of psychology and psychiatry have identified many folk archetypes that are also dream symbols. One such symbol or archetype is the mermaid, merman, et al. These fishy folk, in the opinions of some represent the transforming human psyche."

- Songs of the Aquarians

Merday Morn , begins the slow inexorable build up of Nature's force and represents the noble creative side of Eros, the desire for wisdom, truth and beauty, the Logos. In the Court of the Crimson King represented a new Logos, a divine Logos/Eros (Thinking with Feeling).

"Eros inspires humans to outrun the drag of the "meat"--the flesh--by attaching human attention to what formally attracts the mind. As Platonists and Gnostics down through the ages have insisted, Eros guides us to Logos."

- Heim: Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace

The Crimson King reborn is the degree to which Thinking and Feeling, Apollo and Dionysus, are united.
One of the myths of Dionysus well describes the dual nature of Eros and humanity.

"The Titans ripped Dionysus apart and ate his dis-membered pieces. This is the origin of his first name, Zagreus [lit. 'torn apart'].

Zeus raged, hurled his bolts of lightning and reduced the Titans to ashes. It is said that out of those ashes, humanity was born, so that although every man and woman may be full of that Titanic strife, they also carry a spark of divinity within them always. Zagreus is thus the name of the divine spark within the field of Titanic anxiety, or faith within dark separativeness."

- Ecstatic Dance

In The Devil's Triangle it is "Titanic strife" that contends with the divine spark (higher Logos/Eros) in all of us.

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Hand of Sceiron

"The nether deep grew black as a sea & rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones throw from us appear'd and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent; at last to the east, distant about three degrees appear'd a fiery crest above the waves; slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks till we discover'd two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw, it was the head of Leviathan; his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tygers forehead: soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the raging foam tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence."

- William Blake "A Memorable Fancy"
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"...the hurricane is a universal symbol of the Self in its most primordial form."

- Divine Tempest: The Hurricane As a Psychic Phenomenon

"Typhon represents the non-rational, instinctive, passionate element in Nature and in human beings as opposed to the intellectual principle of order represented by Osiris."

- Plutarch - On Isis and Osiris

The psyche of our protagoinist has constellated back to the paranoid-schizoid position. In terms of human development transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber calls this pre-rational period in the infant's life the Typhonic Self.

The Typhonic Self

"As the infant grows in awareness and consciousness, it slowly becomes aware of the intrinsic pain of existence, the torment inherent in samsara, the mechanism of madness coiled inherently in the manifest world: it begins to suffer. It is introduced to the first Noble Truth, a jolting initiation into the world of perception, whose sole mathematics is the torture-inducing fire of unquenched and unquenchable desire. This is not a desire-ridden world that was lacking in the infant's previous 'wonderful' immersion state, but simply a world that dominated that state unconsciously, a world which the self now slowly, painfully, tragically becomes aware of."

- The Atman Project:
A Transpersonal View of Human Development
by Ken Wilber

"Osiris and Typhon are the two faces of the Sun, one vivifying, the other scorching, the two waters: nourishing fresh and bitter salt, creation vs. destruction, origination vs. restraint, Spring vs. Autumn, moisture vs. drought, plenty vs. scarcity, health vs. fever (typhos), identity vs. difference, reason vs. irrationality. In sum, Osiris is Order and Typhon is Chaos; neither can be eliminated."

- Five Days Out of Time by John Opsopaus

In Egyptian mythology, the duality of Osiris and Typhon is resolved by the neutral influence of Isis, the mother of them both. Isis is the Mother Earth who waits "balanced on the scales". But, as mother of Osiris and Typhon, her sons actually represent the positive and negative aspects of her character. Therefore, she is also behind the conflict, orchestrating the "balance of change".

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