The Poisoned Apple Part 2
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- Created: Wednesday, 12 February 2014 19:05
The Poisoned Apple Part 2: Snow White and the Poison Apple
“All alone my dear… the little men are not here?” So says the face of the crone as she appears at the window of the home of Disney’s Snow White who is making gooseberry pie. “It's apple pies that makes the men-folks mouths water,” continues the old lady in a voice of calculated sweetness, “Wait until you taste one.” As she brings the poison apple to the maiden the birds in the trees, recognizing her malign intent, swoop down to attack her. Although temporarily thwarted the canny queen in witch form feigns a “poor heart” and is led into the house by the kindly girl for a rest.
Inside the witch plays a new trick, telling Snow White that the apple is a magical one. Here we have the power of the partial truth as an even more enchanting lie: this is a “wishing apple – one bite and all your dreams will come true.” “There must be something your little heart desires,” she says, warming to her role, or someone? Of course there is. Snow White wishes “that he will carry me away to his castle where we will live happily ever after” and bites into the red fruit with the words, “Oh I feel strange.” The exultant queen witch cries aloud, “Now I will be the fairest in the land!”
In his 1563 book, On the Tricks of Demons, Johann Weyer, a Protestant physician, questioned the capacity of old peasant women to fly on broomsticks and become the sexual consorts of demons. He wrote, “Love men, kill errors, fight for the truth without any cruelty.” This sober, sincere and rather kindly man wondered if many of these poverty stricken old ladies were not just suffering from depression (melancholia) and mental illness; issues more than exacerbated by the prolonged torture they would suffer at the hands of their interrogators.
Recently I was fortunate enough to go to Florence. I turned this into a mini vacation, in Tuscany first (Pisa, Lucca and Montecatini Terme) and then Florence itself. Whilst the vacation was good, despite the crazy driving of the Italians (truly scary in their capacity to pull out of junctions and parking spaces at the side of the road with no indication) the real focus of the trip had come about through an opportunity created by a great friend who I trained in Psychosynthesis with from 1999-2002. 
The end of 2011 saw the deaths of two figures whose work has shaped my understanding of the understanding of depth psychology and the realms of potential offered by expanding psychology into the realms of the transpersonal and the soulful power of the imagination. One was Roger Woolger whose book Other Lives, Other Selves opened up the doors of perception into the world of prior life regression in a way that was totally cognisant of the therapeutic power of such a perspective. 
In many ways the literal attempt to ‘figure out’ what is going on in the healing process or in the dreams and life of the Psyche (Soul) is one of the great traps for both therapist and client alike when journeying together. James Hillman, the other figure to pass away last year, was one of the great voices against what he named the ‘sin of literalness’, the failure of the imagination that he saw as evidenced by psychology’s great love affair with the medical model and its pseudo-scientific pretensions that were set in motion by Freud and have remained in the behaviourist, cognitive and clinical fields ever since.
Pressfield, the author of the Legend of Bagger Vance and a historical novel on the battle of Thermapolyae is making the extreme point that what emerges from the depths of ourselves that we do not live out creatively, will ultimately turn instead to destruction. Steven Forrest posted a link to a news page on Facebook today that asserts "nearly forty per cent of Europeans suffer mental illness." This is of course a masterly example of the caution (nearly) and bold co-existing and the marvellous use to which statistics can be put as this list includes those suffering from dementia and alcoholics just as much as it does people being medicated for depression (as a salient commentator on the posting suggested we may indeed pathologize the normal issues and stresses of life to a nonsensical level). 
So wrote Robert Bly in a pamphlet in the 1970’s reissued recently in 
I was recently introduced to Henryk Skolimowski, a Polish professor of Ecological Philosophy, in whose writing I’ve discovered a free-thinking, mystical utterly reverent radical viewpoint about the spiritual dimension of our current struggles as a civilization.
In my previous post I addressed the problem of meaning. In a necessarily brief but I hope important way, I suggested that the issue of meaning and purpose is critical to both the individual and to the collective if we wish to co-create a more harmonious world. I then posited that astrology is one the great gifts of symbolism that allows us to participate within a Cosmos that has presence, or meaning in and of itself and for us. In the quote above, Arthur Osborne, the great follower and interpreter of the teachings of the sage Ramana Maharshi, describes what I see as the essence of the role of Evolutionary Astrology. That is that it presents a method for interpreting the symbolism of the perfect cosmic accord between the mathematics of the movements of the planets at the precise moment in space and time of the birth of an individual consciousness and how that symbolic map of the sky is in resonance with the karma of the individual coming into being.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, dictated in the months following his release from a
concentration camp, Victor Frankl delineated one of the seminal theses of the modern era:
he noticed that people’s loss of a sense of meaning was the critical precursor to their death.
Of course the camps were a machinery of death - Eichmann’s accounting was in essence
the mathematics of evil and statistically millions were to die: the dice evidently were loaded.
Yet Frankl saw something unfold in his experience that taught him about the inner workings
of that process as it happened to individuals around him: as young women had their head
shaved and in so doing are robbed of their beauty and femininity, as others could not cope
with separation from their loved ones and fear of the fate that might have befallen them,
their ‘will to be’ faded and within days they would pass away. 
So says Robert Johnson in the first words of his book Transformations and he goes on to explore Don Quixote (literally Sir Codpiece) as an example of simple consciousness and Hamlet (a text penned within a few years of the Cervantes marvel) as the entrance into the dilemma of modern consciousness. The possibility of an enlightened view is represented for him in Goethe’s Faust. Don Quixote literalizes his own perception and imagination and his resultant magical thinking is his joy and his exuberant downfall. He charges ‘giants’ that are windmills spinning in the sun in order to please his princess, a local peasant girl. Hamlet receives the message from the unconscious, from the archetype, the ghost speaks to him of hidden truth and yet this information sends him into the crisis of how to act to return the natural and correct order of things. He is crippled by the terror of the rotten state being also his family, the lingering smell of death on the family bedspread, the trauma of the primal scene as conceived of by the sensitive and absurdly youthful Freud – the thought of our parents in the act that made us. The modern man like Hamlet is anxious about his origins and at times terrified about the future: every ache is a potential cancer, every commute another joyless surrender to auto-pilot, a state that threatens to lead us for more of our lives than we may feel entirely comfortable in.
I have shown in my previous writing my enthusiasm for the Archetypal perspective – a view that I will endeavor to follow here. To begin with the archetype of Sagittarius, the Centaur, we find a creature part horse part man/archer in which the embodiment of the animal self and the human self (with its aspirational shot at the future) are combined. Here we find the correspondence to a state that Ken Wilber in his ongoing anatomy of consciousness aptly refers to as the ‘centauric stage’ in which the naïve persona has encountered shadow (that which it denies about itself) and in its initial dialogue with this shadow has begun to transcend initial limitations to forge a relative mind-body unity. 