Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
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“unknown outer sky,” the one” point of contact of the global, undifferentiated, unconscious psyche, with the real and objective world. This is the tower that the emerging archetypal ego must ascend, at all costs, to behold the light, to reach consciousness.
The outsider’s only memory of a living thing is that of “something mockingly like (himself), but distorted, shriveled, and decaying, like the castle.” This is a reference to either the other archetypal processes in the unconscious (such as the archetypal persona), or, more likely, specifically to the budding archetypal nucleus which will later lead to the development of the foul and loathsome Shadow, the ego’s inescapable “dark brother”….
“Bones and skeletons strewed the stone crypts deep below the foundations,” symbolizing the axial archetypal systems at the very bottom of the Collective Unconscious, in the deepest layers whose contents can never be made conscious. These skeletal systems, these genetically coded ancestral potentialities, lie dormant until experience activates them. A skeleton cannot move without muscles, and an archetype cannot manifest itself unless the organism experiences stimuli corresponding to an archetypal model of reaction. But for the archetypal ego, these “bones and skeletons” appear as “natural everyday events.”
The outsider has learned all (he) knows from the “mouldy texts” of archetypal lore, without the urging or guidance of a teacher, that is, impelled by innate instinctual forces and archetypal memories.
Note that “there were no mirrors in the castle,” because there can be no opposites, no mirror images, in the unconscious, before the individuation of the contents of consciousness. The principle of opposition in the human psyche always applies to a conscious vs. an unconscious system (i.e., ego vs. shadow, persona vs. soul image, introversion vs. extroversion, feeling vs. thinking, sensation vs. intuition), but there can never be opposition between two unconscious constructs or functions: there are no mirrors within the castle….
“Through endless twilights,” the archetypal ego “dreams,” expressing itself in fantasy images and symbols of the unconscious, until the time for individuation is ripe. Then, with a frantic longing for light, or psychic consciousness, the outsider ascends the “black tower,” and reaches the realm of the Personal Unconscious, the crypt lying above the subterranean castle of the Collective Unconscious, at the border of consciousness. This crypt contains countless oblong boxes, which are to become the depository of forgotten-and repressed material during the lifetime of the individual.
At last, the stone trapdoor, the portal to consciousness, is found and forced open, as well as the final barrier, the iron grating, through which shines “the radiant full moon.” In the symbolic language of the psyche, according to analytical theory, the moon stands for a manifestation of the mother archetype as well as for the mother complex, when it appears in dreams. (The mother complex consists of experiences and other material repressed out of the conscious sphere, and encapsulated by the unconscious, which cluster around the powerful nuclear element providing by the Great Earth Mother archetype—the “magna mater”—derived from ancestral experiences with mothers throughout the ages.) Fittingly enough, the outsider states that the moon, the mother archetype, has previously appeared only “in dreams and in vague visions,” in ancestral “memories.”
The stumbling that follows the veiling of the moon, or mother symbol, by a cloud, represents the extreme dependency of the emerging consciousness of the growing infant on the interaction with the maternal psyche. And as the moon comes out again, the view from the borderline of consciousness is clear again, though “stupefying.” The emergence of the conscious ego is not the end but only the beginning of the psychic quest, because the goal of personality development is not the emergence of the ego, but the realization of the Self….
The following wanderings of the outsider represent the odyssey of the human psyche toward the fabled castle of lights, the Self. The outsider’s progress is not fortuitous, as a kind of “latent memory” guides him, since the transcendent function of self-realization is also an archetypal process. It is significant here to notice that the outsider sometimes follows “the visible road,” or the way dictated by reason and experience, but sometimes leaves it “to thread across meadows where only the occasional ruins” bespeak “the ancient presence of a forgotten road,” or, in other words, pursues his goal following the path indicated by the unconscious wisdom of the archetypes, a path which may appear at times as illogical or irrational,but is nevertheless psychically necessary. The tendency to strive for self-realization is innate, encoded in the genetic combinations carrying the “latent memories” or archetypes from our ancestral past.
In this quest, the outsider has become the “wandering hero,” the traditional symbol of man’s voyage toward Selfhood, of the ego’s longing for the ultimate expansion of consciousness. Finally, he reaches his destination, the “ivied castle” whose windows are “gorgeously ablaze with light.” The castle of lights stands for the Self, the unification of consciousness and the unconscious, the realization of the total psyche. This is, according to Jung, the purpose of human existence, even though complete equalization, complete self-realization, is not possible, because the lack of gradient implies total entropy—the flow of libido coming to a standstill—and this cannot occur save in death, the goal of all life. (One reason why total entropy never occurs during the individual’s striving for wholeness, is that the psyche is only a partially closed energy system, with energy loss due to work, and energy gain through food).
The outsider peers through a window of the ivied castle and finds there a merry company, the contents of consciousness, rationality, sanity…but as he enters in an attempt to join or integrate with the rest, consciousness reacts not only to him and his feeble persona, but to the inevitable and escapable Shadow that always accompanies him (and every human being), the unconscious and inseparable opposite of the ego which in one instant shatters the illusion of rationality and the hopes of self-realization.
The final horror comes in the moment of truth, when the ego perceives its own Shadow, its unconscious opposite reflected in that fateful mirror. The outsider sees the atavistic nightmare that always lurks at the threshold of rationality, and which Lovecraft so skillfully described as “the compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable,” all that the ego abhors, rejects, and represses because of rational, esthetic, or ethical reasons: his “dark brother” who becomes blacker, denser, and more powerful the more it has been alienated from consciousness. It is “the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and dissolution,” the conglomerate of all the ego perceives as ultimate evil, clustered around the archaic, undifferentiated Shadow archetype. “It was the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide,” of that which (from the point of view of the shocked and horrified ego) should have always remained underground, buried in the unconscious. With deep loathing, the outsider notices that the apparition presents “a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape,” being the distorted, unconscious parody of the conscious ego.
Then, as the outstretched fingers of the outsider touch those of his unconscious and nightmarish mirror image, an instant of ego-shadow fusion occurs, that goes beyond mere recognition or understanding. This is the closest the outsider ever comes to self-realization and psychic wholeness…. For the cataclysmic revelation of the Shadow within himself, the understanding that he and the monstrous abomination standing before him are one, instantly shatters sanity as he experiences (and is unable to cope with) the most traumatic experience of human existence.
In that instant “there crashed upon (his) mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.” As consciousness and unconsciousness touch, fuse for an instant, “all that had been” becomes evident, all is understood in a moment of terrible insight. But the flood of anxiety is unendurable, awareness of the truth is too painful, and a desperate repression occurs. With this regressive flow of energy or libido, the outsider “forgets” what has horrified him. “The burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images,” that is, in the chaos of opposing systems within the psyche. The price of unification, of Selfhood, is too high, and it is better to live in ignorance than to accept the awful reality of man’s atavistic and unconscious nature. This utter failure leaves the outsider “dazed,