University of Transilvania
Faculty of Letters
Departament of Romanian – English Author: Andrei F??IE
A GROUP OF STUDIES IN THE FIELD OF PECULIAR UNDERSTANDING
Bra?ovTable of Contents
LITERATURE AND ARCHETYPE
AN ESOTERIC PERSPECTIVE OF THE SHAKESPEAREAN UNIVERSE
University of Transilvania Supervisor: Ruxandra IV?NCESCU Faculty of Letters
Departament of Romanian – English Student: Andrei F??IE
LITERATURE AND ARCHETYPE
Bra?ov, 2017
Summary
Mythical vision and trancendenceMyth and Ilo Tempore
Regression of The Homo AestheticusTemporal transcendence
Death and ritual
Redemption
The Alter Ego of Death
Rites of passage
Literature and Archetype
Homer, Plato, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Vasile Voiculescu, Mircea Eliade and the list could go on. With these names I want to bring up titles such as The Iliad / The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Vasile Voiculescu’s anthology of short proses and almost the entire work and activity of Mircea Eliade. These are just examples of the evolution of the spiritual part in literature and an explicit evidence of its mythic origin.
Mythical vision and trancendenceMyth and Ilo Tempore
What is “the myth”, the essence of the spirituality? Mircea Eliade offers a definition that he considers to be the least imperfect, because there cannot be only one definition of this broad concept: “The myth recounts a sacred history; it relates an event that happened in the primordial time, the legendary time of “beginnings”. In other words, the myth tells how because of the actions of the supernatural beings, a reality was born, even if it is a total reality such as the Cosmos, or just a fragment: an island, a species, a trait of human behavior or an institution.” (Eliade 1978:5/6). This definition brings into discussion the concept without whom we cannot comprehend the importance of the myths to man and implicitly to literature. The notion of ilo tempore or the beginning of time it is rendered absolutely through the existence of myths. Ilo tempore condense the common point of the beginning of existence whether we talk about beings or soulless things. The author’s definition for this argument is: “The fabulous time in which the concepts of past, present and future have no place it is the starting point of sanctity and truth.” (Eliade 2013:54). Thus considering that now we are discussing about the birth moment of the real life, or the life of a character, we can understand that the man is mortal because something happened in ilo tempore. Thereby, any occurrence in the present resides in a happenstance that took place the sacred time, or the original time – an ab initio incident.
The regression of Homo AestheticusWe need to turn the discussion from the idea of origin to the term genesis. The Genesis, as we can expect, is a denomination that contains the main idea of origin of creation as seen in a holy book no matter we speak about The Bible, Torah, and The Qur’an and so on and so forth. We are moving from a moment-like type of creation to an action-like creation. It is widely spread among the confessions a transitive aspect of the contemporary man, from homo aestheticus to homo religiosus. In translation, the present man, conscious, passing through a process of consciousness moves into the stage of religious man or a man apodictically related with the eternity. The obvious question now is: what is the reason of this, let’s say, behavior of man, a behavior since ancient times? Because of the disease of death. Curing the effects of time-passing, any man could go back to the perfect state of the unborn. The regression to uterus. Regressus ad uterum. A perfect example for proving the previous apothegm is the main character in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde. The protagonist being a man willing to keep his youth and his virility by any means, violates any low and recourse to an supernatural instrument of controlling time, becoming immune to time-passing and moving from a physic and meta-physic point of view from the profane space into the sacred space. However, his desire that reside in the refusing of the truth of the ephemeral nature of man along with his will of forcing the temporal and mythical barriers, took him into a complete process of dehumanization having as a result a human residue killed by his own craving. Now we can conclude that the homo religiosus searches for his role and purpose in the universe by assuming the consequences of the events in the ilo tempore, but without interfering them, in order to go back into the sacred time.
Temporal transcendence
This human dream of everlasting life and the fear of oblivion after death have been certified even in Homer’s writings. In the Iliad, Homer relates with edifying details the way in which the culture of those time contained this core of glory, a glory with the role of engraving in the stone of time the name of a person. The heroic acts became in this manner ways of name perpetuation by reiterating them in stories, recording them in official papers, inscriptions and so on. Achilles, Homer’s hero, becomes a glorious model of this reality and we can understand the fear of oblivion by looking at the doom-verdict that romans could consider in different cases of serious law-breaking: damnatio memoriae. This verdict meant erasing the name of the person in cause from any document, archive or any other form of name-keeping. Certificates, papers or even engravings were destroyed, all in order for that person to be forgotten from history. This centering towards glory obtained with sacrifices, the extrinsically influence of the society towards the individual comes into contact with the Judeo-Christian world, a completely different perspective about life.
Death and ritual
Redemption
Following Mircea Eliade’s studies, we get to learn that “It is hard to sum up in a few pages the connections between the Christianity and the mythical thinking. These connections bring more distinct problems. In the first place the problem of the ambiguity of the term myth. The first theologians took this term in the meaning that was imposed centuries ago in the Greco-Roman world, the meaning of fable, fiction, lie. In consequence, they didn’t want to see in the character of Jesus a mythical character and neither in the Christological drama a myth. Since the second century, the Christian theology needed to defend Jesus’s historicity from the heretics and agnostics and from the pagan philosophers.” (Eliade 1978:152). The contrast between the two ideologies, the Greek one based on the individual importance in his society and the Christian one based on the redemption, appears, we could say, at the beginning of history and gives birth to the self-contradictory mind of the man, a mind that oscillated between the two notions even in the present – in an unintentional manner.
Death’s alter-ego
We need to slip into the common ground of these worlds through a subject even more interesting than the one before, namely: sleep and death. I offer you know two mythological examples from these two so different cultures. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, says: „You will not find so easy again, athenians, such a man: listen to me and you will spare me. You may get angry on me. This is how the ones that sleep and are being awakend get angry. You may even hurt me, if you listen to Anytos. Anyway you may even kill me easily. But then again you will spend the rest of your lifes sleeping, unless only the God, having mercy on you, will send you another one, the same.” (Eliade 1978:120). On the other side we have the awakening that has brought us all here, the awakening of Adam that „has awaken from his sleep and he raised his eyes to the place where the light came from.”
(Eliade 1978:120). In the same manner in which the famous religion hystorian states, this common idea proves the importance of the revealing idea of awakening. No wonder that in romanian there is the expression „to e awaken to reality”. The act of sleep becomes an alter-ego of death, a simillar state from which the one awakened obtains a new chance for redemption and for accomplishment of his life, too. These ideas, concepts or common points are described better in Carl Gustave Jung’s study called The Archetypes and the collective unconcious. These archetypal images or mental imprints of myths are invariants which Jung says: „The archetypal images are a priori so full of signification, that we never question what is their semnification. Gods are dying from time to time in order for us to unexpectedly discover that they don’t represent anything else but useless object made by human hand from wood and stone. In the reality we discover that we never thought about these images. And when the man starts thinging on them, he does it with the so called „ration”, but which is in fact nothing else but the sum of his misconceptions and limitations. …” (C.G.Jung). It appears that the presence of these typical images in the collective unconscious creates a web of similarities that can be also found in literature trough the common traits of different writtings. The idea of spirituality evolves from a point in which the mortal world from the common time, profane, combines with the one of the gods which are above, in ilo tempore as in Homer, to a world in which the sacred and the profane blends subtly, the sacred being revealed almost entirely by its revelations in the profane as in Maitrey, the interbelic novel of Mircea Eliade.
6. Rites of passage
Another archetypal feature of literature it is found in the presence of the Rites of Passage. These customs are not only found in literature but also in the humane behavior – and there is the folkloric literature which serves as a guide or as a “handbook” for the man in order not to forget these rites. For example, going back to Homer, we know that Odysseus or Ulysses arrives at the Lothofagus Island, meaning the island of the lotus-eater people. Odysseus refuses the specific food, and by this he is able to go back to his trip. These facts evince the rites of passage because: we have a character, Odysseus, that leaves from his space, Troy, and his journey or his way into the new space it is full of dangers, this space being a transitional space of the unknown. The food represents a ritual of acceptance and because of this, the refusing of food given by the lothofags depicts the denial of the integration in their space and culture. Unlike him, his comrades ate the food and became unable to go back to the expedition. Extrapolating this example we are reaching the 3 stages or thresholds of the human existence: birth, marriage and death. All these passing’s are in the archetypal manner correspondent to 3 specific actions: separation (the new born from the mother, the grooms from their families and the defunct from his home), the transit period (the 40 days before the baptism – wedding and the wake) and the assimilation into the new world (the receiving of the blessing, of the common name or the funeral ceremony / burial). The examples are brief because of the existence of so many other rites that succeed in each stage, as in the purification of the one being in the passing. All of these specific traits of the traditions are conserved in the folkloric literature and as an example of these there are melodies dedicated to the bride that leaves, melodies used during funeral as “The Song of Dawn” and are also rendered through rites of passing in other writings as we can see in the burial of Hector or in Dante’s road through the Inferno. The man being in these trials becomes a center, a protagonist as a character is. This center unites the 3 zones: the profane, the transit part and the sacred one, following to be perfected in the ascesis to the superior, to the infinity.
In conclusion, after this incursion in myths, into the sacred and the profane, in books without an apparent link, we can see how the spirituality evolved in literature taking different aspects, hiding under different masks and revealing in the profane in different forms. What is it certain is that we have the glorious gods of Homer, the hearty gods of Plato, Dante’s Inferno, the ghost that haunts Hamlet or the demons of Dorian Gray among with the mystic nature of Vasile Voiculescu and Mircea Eliade offers us many keys into the understanding of the spirituality in literature.
References:
•Arnold Van Gennep ( 1996 ) – Riturile de trecere: Editura POLIROM
Carl Gustave Jung ( 2014 ) – Arhetipul si inconstientul colectiv. Bucure?ti: Editura Trei
Gilbert Durand ( 1977 ) – Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului. Bucure?ti: Editura Univers
Mircea Eliade ( 1978 ) – Aspecte ale mitului. Bucure?ti: Editura UniversMircea Eliade ( 2013 ) – Imagini ?i simboluri: Editura HumanitasMircea Eliade ( 2013 ) – Sacrul ?i profanul: Editura HumanitasRuxandra Iv?ncescu ( 2008-2009 ) – Folclor: Reprografia Universit??ii “TRANSILVANIA” din Bra?ov
Dante Alighieri – Divina ComedieHomer – IliadaHomer – OdiseeaMircea Eliade – Tratat de istorie a religiilorOscar Wilde – Portretul lui Dorian Gray
Platon – BanchetulVasile Voiculescu – AntologieWilliam Shakespeare – Hamlet
*This is a translated version of the study written originally in Romanian.
University of Transilvania Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Oana TatuFaculty of Letters
Departament of Romanian – English Student: Andrei F??IE
II.AN ESOTERIC PERSPECTIVE
OF THE
SHAKESPEAREAN UNIVERSE
Bra?ov, 2017
Table of Contents
Sentence Outline:
The Shakespearean universe originality against the immanent reality.
1.2 Hex and Havoc
2. The conjunction between the archetypal characters under the archetype of malign influence
2.1 The Malign Influence
2.2. The monad conjunction, the Persephone complex and the symmetrical paralysis
2.2.1. The monad conjunction
2.2.2. The Persephone’s Complex
2.2.3. The Symmetrical Paralysis Concept
Conclusions
A statement of thesis:
In the following pages my aim is to prove the existence of esoteric interpretation in Shakespeare’s opera with tools I tried to compose in order to serve my purpose. The esoteric content I am interpreting is represented by the symbols and myths that joint together, creating the specific Shakespearean aura, an aura full of pure mystery fuelled by its own inertia.
Keywords:
Archetype, Meaning, Interpretation, Concept, Tragic, Myth, Esoteric, Perspective
1. The Shakespearean universe originality against the immanent reality.
William Shakespeare is one of the best-known playwrights ever. What makes him so special is that he created this mirrored universe by looking in the shards of our broken society. To be more explicit, Shakespeare’s work has its own “gravity”, it revolves around its own sun – all because the author did everything to make sense of his ideas, without making the appearance of a fake, supra/super-natural world. As an example, in Hamlet it appears very normal that Hamlet kills Polonius by mistake with his sword, because of the thought of a mouse. But would we really kill a mouse with a sword? And what about Polonius’s silhouette? Of course, the extent of this idea has its own flaws if we think about Shakespeare’s fairies and ghosts, and these flaws are proofs of the uniqueness of his universe, because these elements are perfectly placed in his imaginary world, world that was assigned to us.
Another reality that sustains my thesis here is that Shakespeare’s plays were written for a blended audience, from Queen Elizabeth to those who were looking for some theatrical experience without knowing the cathartic effect. This being said, it is obvious that the supernatural tales would have made impression among the viewers, but beside this their preset of thinking would have been inculcated with symbols and meanings beyond our superficial level of understanding. This is important because in the immanent reality we try not to look beyond the first level of perception or after the immediate act we are living through. We are used not to think in “meta” terms, in order not to fall in the superstition area or to overthink our life. But in the Shakespearean universe, the “meta-perspective” is the natural, the native one and it becomes the shape in which our perspective is induced by Shakespeare’s drama.
It is obvious for us that once a reader starts a book, it is like signing an agreement through which he consents to trusting the information in the book. But considering that Shakespeare’s plays were mainly written for the stage, and less for reading, this agreement had to be substituted by something, and this is why he succeeded in the Elizabethan society. Once the play was performed, everything that came with it was considered to be true, natural and veridical. Adding to this the fact that in the Elizabethan period there were rumors about magic, witches and all sort of esoterical things, the strangeness of a play could be easily apprehended by the society, with all of its appendages.
1.2. Hex and Havoc
The XVIIth is known for its dark lore around the world. As an example of the occult I will put in discussion Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The stereotypical image of the witch is that of an old lady sitting next to a cauldron and mixing something inside. This archetypal image of the witch is easily seen in the IVth act, scene one, when the following line appears:
“Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
( Macbeth – Act IV, Scene I )
There are 2 major symbols in these lines, the fire and the cauldron. Both with alchemical roots, they work together in order to create something new. Fire is known as the representation of change, of transformation. The cauldron is the isomorphic human uterus, the bowl or the sphere of the uncreated. These two symbols combined and correlated with the context of the quoted lines are the subtle message that was sent to us, a message of a new turn in the story, of a transformation that is going to happen. These characters, “the three wyrd sisters”, are nothing but a conjunction between the mythical Parcae ( Moirae, in the Greek pantheon ) and the XVIIth century beliefs regarding witchcraft. The sisterhood and their association with foresight and Hecate’s make the old perspective, but they are combined with the “weird(ness)” ( same phonetic root as wyrd ), magic elements and spell ingredients that help them wreak havoc through their hex.
Fire also appears in Julius Caesar play as the method of suicide in Portia’s case.
When Portia realize the fact that Brutus will be killed for certain, her desire for redeem becomes her impetus for suicide in the name of reborn. To acquire this goal, she ate fire and died in terrifying pain.
This depiction of the symbol comes to us in the shape of “edible fire”. This eating of fire has many interpretations here. The first one is that fire is also the element of purification, the item of regeneration as is shown in the analogy of the INRI abbreviation. Beside the classical denomination of Jesus Christ as “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum” the letters could also stand for “Igne Natura Renovatur Integra” (Durand 1997:216). Durand’s allegory found in the book titled The anthropological structures of the imaginary consists in the idea of returning to purity, because through fire, nature is reborn in purity. Fire becomes a tool of purification, a method of natural catharsis
I sustain my point of view by this Durandian idea in which I consider Portia’s way o
death as a rebirth of herself in order to redeem Brutus soul with this cathartic ritual. Portia tried to transcend death, to transform in the name of truth and love she bared.
These portrayals prove the fact that Shakespeare’s design of his plays has a unique
pattern of archetypes, consciously or unconsciously made to express ideas as shown in the previous paragraphs. I would like to approach this design in a surgical manner, in order to see every piece of this puzzle of archetypal characters.
2. The conjunction between the archetypal characters under the archetype of malign influence
I will use the concept of conjunction in my thesis for showing the juncture between the English author’s characters, as a perspective in which we shall see the system that operates with lots of symbols and hidden meanings. Every interpretation that will be given in the following pages can be dismantled or at least doubted because the extent of the interpretation will go deep in the esoteric substrate, however my aim is to check whether if this reading has the same endeavor as the classical meaning that has been attributed to his writings.
2.1 The Malign Influence
One of the recognizable archetypes in Shakespeare’s plays is the one of The Malign Influence. This element of the play is the one that brings the idea of chaos in the harmony of normal life as seen in the theatrical universe. The element of malign influence can be seen in Hamlet as Claudius, the one that brings trouble because of his will for power and for his brother’s wife, in Caesar’s drama as Cassius’s unscrupulous methods of manipulation and duplicity and in Macbeth as Hecate, the goddess of black magic ( in the play it is emphasized the darker shade of her mythological aspect ) which is the incarnation of the omen in the play.
“(…). So it comes in all the cases the “very” general schema of animation doubled by anguish provoked by change, the leaving without return and death. These significations are polarized in the divinity which guides the souls and guards the inferno, Hecate, the goddess of the black moon and of darkness, powerfully hippomorphic, female demon and nightmare, that Hesiod considers to be the ruller of riders, master of madness, somnambulism, dreams and especially of Empusia, ghost of the night anguish.”
(Durand 1977:91/92)
Going further with the Durandian interpretation, Hecate is the mighty witch of despair, she is the vessel of horror and abhorrence so her presence in the play is a harbinger of decadence. Another harbinger of evil is the raven, and also the incantation that Lady Macbeth portrays:
“The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry “Hold, hold!”(Shakespeare – Macbeth, Act I, Scene V)
This excerpt I selected is the sample that we need in order to run the tests for proving the existence of the esoteric meaning in Shakespeare’s drama. This monologue has an easy to perceive bizarre or even dark atmosphere. The elements that contribute to this tone are on the one hand words such as raven, hoarse, croaks, fatal, spirits, mortal, unsex, crown, direst, cruelty, blood, remorse, breasts, gall, murdering, substances, mischief, night, pall, dunnest, hell, knife, wound, heaven, dark, cry and also phonetic elements that are found in these lexical structures (e.g. a lot of round vowels and plosive or fricative consonants ) and their pronunciation which add up a dramatic effect along the semantic content which consistings of mundane but evil-associated terms. A constellation of items it is created that forms, actually a system in which each and every element has its unique role.
“The final cause of the wing and also of the feather, in the perspective of a “pteropshychology”, it is the angelism.(…)
The alchemist imaging, so reach in ornithological representation, gives us the opportunity to put the wing and flight in the will of transcendence.”.( Durand 1977:161/162 )
It may appear contradictory to us that Durand gives us the definition of an upright movement of the essence in our dark and twisty context, but in reality we must understand that no ascension or transcendence can be possible without degradation or a total destroying. An “winged” example is the Phoenix which has to turn into ashes in order to transcend, to become immortal. This illustration combines the previous description of fire in other cases and our peculiar scene in order to create the idea of changing, yet not a virtuous one but in a malevolent portrayal. This being said, Lady Macbeth invokes with her power of speech the forces that will bring about an absolute change, a gender change not from female to male – but to the unsexed, the unborn, a tool of the dark reign. Adding up to the previous idea of Hecate’s malign influence, we can make the connection between Lady Macbeth and “the goddess of the black moon” in the interpretation of the submissiveness of Macbeth’s wife to the forces of evil in the purpose of achieving great power and force of will.
Another example of fire use consists in the scene I had already mentioned, the “edible fire”. In Julius Caesar we can find this intriguing scene that I will try to decipher using the Durandian perspective and logical connections that we may identify in this direction.
“BRUTUS: Impatient of my absence,
And grief that young Octavius with Mark Antony
Have made themselves so strong: — for with her death
That tidings came; — with this she fell distract,
And, her attendants absent, swallow’d fire.”
( Shakespeare – Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III)
The malign influence here is represented by Cassius, because his inherent motivations are the engine of the entire tragedy. His actions alongside with the duplicitous behavior and the reasons he gives for his purpose are the elements that combined wreak havoc in the order of Rome. Although we interpreted in the previous example the malign influence through the esoteric perspective, here we have to take into discussion the symbol of fire as the result of it.
As I previously said, the womb can be the archetype of the uncreated, the unborn and the
“yet to come”. We need to take in consideration the space that Shakespeare gives is in the
Scene of Portia’s death, because the description of it can lend to various interpretations.
We don’t need the actual action of it, but exactly what Shakespeare said. Portia “swallowed fire”. Portia is the vessel of truth, of light, she’s the unique character of the play because of her appearance. She’s brave, bold and trustworthy but also loving and caring with her beloved husband. She’s pure and she will form with Brutus a monad of light-tragedy. The way she chose to die depicts a need of rebirth, a return to the birth point, as the Phoenix does when it turns to ashes in order to start the life cycle again. But more than this, Portia combines the symbol of fire, tool of transcendence, with the symbol of the cauldron, the womb. In spite of setting herself on fire, a much-more logical option regarding suicide by fire methods, she chooses to eat it, to associate her inner grieving and her suffering for the tragedy of the near death of her husband with the feeling of being burned from the inside. This action shows both a strong desire for sacrifice and the very well masked symbol of rebirth.
2.2 The monad conjunction, the Persephone complex and the symmetrical paralysis
2.2.1 The monad conjunction
The monad conjunction is the conjunction concept I conceptualized in order to express the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, Macbeth and his wife and Brutus and Portia. These characters are pieces of the same monad, because in order for the play to function they need to interact, to construct next to the other. They are unique and single organism with a proper inertia that breaks the first appearance. The clearest example is Portia and Brutus, where the two of them share the same feelings and aura (by aura I mean the feeling which is offered by reading when it comes to imagine the couple), they are two aspects of the same main virtue: purity (as in Hamlet-Ophelia monad the trait is of doubt and in Macbeth’s monad the trait is that of frustration). This virtue is tragically destroyed during the play, and this is one of the reasons for the tragic core in Julius Caesar play. This monad embodies order and is meant to show how things are supposed to be in order to be right, so the tragic fracture creates the time of the tragedy and its inertia.
In Hamlet the monad of doubt depicts a non-fulfilled couple because of the complementarity between Hamlet’s philosophical doubts and Ophelia’s melancholically expressed doubts. Also, Ophelia is the only character that reaches the heights of Hamlets aspirations, but because of the Persephone Complex she can’t touch them by any means – so the monad cracks and a tragic core is again created. In the case of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, their frustration is formed by their unmatched desires, desires that are so vague and entangled in a Gordian Node of power and control. The “royal” couple contains a unique imprint of caring and love, but combined with the dark behavior of Lady Macbeth it leaves space for doubt. In this case, the tragic fracture is caused mainly by the malign influence but is fuelled by the incompatibility of understanding the outcome that the spouses have. Lady Macbeth desires power and greatness, and Macbeth desires on a certain level this too, but tries to understand the possible flaws of his doings.
2.2.2. The Persephone’s Complex
Regarding the cursed Persephone, The Persephone Complex contains the inability of one character ( usually a female character, in the examples I chose ) to leave a situation but also having the feeling of superiority due to the context, and that of being held captive in this complex by a certain action that cannot be erased or undone. The patients of my study are, again, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and Portia. For further explanations I will take Ophelia as the patient zero.
Ophelia is the embodiment of nostalgia, melancholy, misunderstanding, frustration in love and well masked excess of femininity. ( – Not to mention the obvious and already known traits of the Bachelard’s concept that bears her name, The Ophelia Complex). These traits are not what bind her to the mythological character Persephone, but her pace. She does not have a choice and is forced to mold into the expectations of the others (as Freud explains in The Ophelia Complex description symptoms), but more than this she is unable to escape this situation because she feels superior. She is the one and only in Hamlet’s variables (this shows the discordance in their perspective, although this discordance is propellant of their monad), and she can’t escape because her pomegranate seeds are her love for Hamlet, for Laertes and Polonius. These men (also guilty for The Ophelia Complex) are the seeds that keep her captive and drive her mad. Ophelia is the Persephone in the play because she is the engine of some particular reactions, but no one is truly interested in her – the same as in the mythological side where Persephone disappearance makes nature die due to Demeter’s sorrow, but Persephone is the passive shade of the important aspect: the death of nature, and she is the one that Hades chooses to reign with him but her prerogatives are superficial and she is more of a trophy than a goddess of the underworld.
These explanations can be also used in Julius Caesar or Macbeth, Portia feeling superior because of her love, and because of Brutus social position near the Caesar; at the same time, Portia held captive in her unmatched desire to be purified by the context in which Brutus death is inevitable. Maybe not as explicit as in Ophelia’s case, Portia is a lesser variation of this complex which can be found in Lady Macbeth too. She is unable to leave the foreseeing she received, her future expectations, her superior feeling here come obviously from her possibility to become a queen and also from her mastering of the dark magic (which makes her submissive to Hecate’s, not a true queen of the dark), and her pomegranate seeds are represented here by her direct interventions in Macbeth’s decisions, which leave her with the guilt that will be also the remorse which kill her in the end.
2.2.3. The Symmetrical Paralysis Concept
The final step into deciphering the way in which the archetypal characters merge is to express the process of the symmetrical paralysis that occurs when the monad suffers the tragic fracture. For this, I will use Lady Macbeth and Portia to present my arguments that prove the existence of The Symmetrical Paralysis Concept.
In the tragedy of Macbeth there is the monad of frustration formed by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. This mechanism is fractured by their own actions and decisions, because the flaw in the system is caused by their belief in the wyrd sisters sayings. Once more a discordance appears between the blind desire for power on the part of the wife and the careful steps that the husband would take, but finally doesn’t. This dissonance appears in the middle of a powerful love they bear for each other and it causes a paralysis in their relation, but a paralysis that affects both of them. Lady Macbeth loses her ability to think straight or to be rational because of the remorse, and Macbeth suffers from remorse too being also unable to keep his feet on the ground. In Portia’s case, the tragic fracture occurs when death becomes inevitable and here it is easier to see how they are both struck by a paralysis that consists in a desire for a cathartic death. Portia uses fire and Brutus commits suicide throwing himself towards his own sword, confirming his words that Caesar’s death makes the weapons turn against their bearer.
3. Conclusions
My research is rooted in a passion I have for hidden, unknown, mystery, mythology, esoteric and other mystic areas that could be fairly associated with the concept of hermeneutics. Starting from this I tried to observe some of Shakespeare’s plays from a different perspective, I tried to apply to their content an explanatory operation comparable with Durand’s work.
The esoteric perspective in the Shakespearean universe is the point of view which tries to surgically extract parts of the elements of this universe and analyze them in order to develop hypotheseis regarding the potential hidden meaning, which is inflicted either consciously or unconsciously by the author. It may appear as an over-interpretation, but the meaning of my thesis is to display potential relations between the esoteric content and the context used for exemplification, considering the fact that the XVIth and also in the XVIIth centuries are known for their concern in these arts of the occult.
References:
Durand, G. – 1977. – Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului. Bucure?ti: Univers.
Jung, C. G. – 2014. – Arhetipurile si inconstientul colectiv. Bucure?ti: Editura TreiShakespeare, W. – 2008. – Hamlet. Bucure?ti: Pandora
Shakespeare, W. – 2016. – Macbeth. Bucure?ti: Pandora Publishing
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