Gods of War, the Gift of Anger, and the Ongoing Struggle for Peace

“Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead, wear your hair matted, long and ostentatious, but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you find God?” Kabir

Reading both The Iliad, the oldest and greatest war epic of all time, and a book of local history called Bloody Mohawk, by Richard Berleth, concurrently a few weeks back, I cannot help but look violence, and our human propensity for it, in the face. Bloody Mohawk is a well-done history of pre-Revolution and Revolutionary war periods in our upstate New York area, a time when we were gloriously multi-cultural, in the truest sense, and when war was anything but an abstraction fought far off upon a distant land and people, using sophisticated weapons of killing that mediate the act. Like warfare in ancient Troy, the killing that brought us this land and our freedom from colonial rule was hand-to-hand, up close and personal, and frequently involved the slaughter of women and children and old people, white, red and even brown.

In the case of Bloody Mohawk, and the history of this region and of America, I believe it is important we all know these facts, and even more of them; The history of our country is soaked in blood, but generation after generation remains ignorant/innocent of the fact, which jibes so unpleasantly with images of sparkling beaches and happy clusters of healthy, Coca-Cola drinking young people. We are shocked by the level of bloodshed in a book like Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, but in truth the book could have been written around the colorful life of our own Sir William Johnson, who frequently and effectively led his Mohawk friends on the warpath against the French and their Indian allies, using techniques of forest warfare that were all on the Indians’ terms. This included scalp-taking and the use of elaborate and unimaginably cruel torture.

I think that we should all wonder, where did all of that viciousness and aggression go? Did it just simply wither away as the Indians diminished in number and became pragmatically pacified, and the land from sea to shining sea belonged fully to the invaders? What happens to these primitive, instinctual capacities for, well, for killing?

I want to talk about anger here in this piece, even though I realize that anger and war are not the same thing, and that violence and killing do not require having anger to drive them. Still, what other emotion leads to fantasies of killing, in our modern, well-behaved, suburbanized minds? And what emotion does one need, actually, to go to war against injustice or aggression, assuming one has a choice? And, prominently in my mind is the question what difference it makes if our anger, which is innate in all of us, is unconscious rather than conscious? I am sure that the settlers and Indians in colonial times along the Mohawk, which was the frontier of that time, did not worry over much about their capacity for anger. They felt it frequently, as each side suffered insult or injury, and acted on it. Anger and its lethal consequences were, in the frontier context, justified.

In contrast, modern commentators often point out the lack of public anger we see today in the face of acts of blatant wrongdoing on the part of ruling government and corporations. In fact, in the film we watched Tuesday night in our Temenos group, Dancing in the Flames, about psychoanalyst and writer Marion Woodman, we heard Andrew Harvey, her interviewer, make exactly that comment. And later on in the film, Marion mentioned the tremendous anger she feels at what is happening to the planet. Clearly, this woman dedicated to the work of spiritual transformation does not feel anger to be antithetical to higher consciousness.

Where, I wonder, is peoples’ anger located these days? A lot of it, by all appearances, is directed at each other. Having lost the collective enemy of Communist Russia and the Iron curtain, and the new enemy of terrorism being so much less ideological and definable, anger has become rather inchoate. At a Christmas party a few days ago, I listened to a teacher in our inner city high school, named John, express legitimate anger at state officials coming into the school, deeming it seriously deficient (I forget the designation they gave it) and making only one comment before they left the district 3 days later: their comment was that the classroom seating was still in old-fashioned rows. This, to a school whose teachers struggle with 47 languages in the student body, with many under-socialized children from poor homes, inadequate basic supplies, and so on.

I appreciated John’s candidness and his indignation, but as he sputtered on, he inevitably (it seems) placed his anger ultimately – after that directed at the well-paid layer of do-nothing school administrators, then at the teachers’ union and third, at guidance counselors - at the door of the social welfare system. He appeared incapable of a John Taylor Gatto reach with his anger, which would cut right past administrators, teachers, parents, and social welfare to the systemic nature of the problem, and to those whose interest this “dysfunctional system” serves – and actually serves quite functionally. (John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and other books powerfully indicting of our public education system came to Utica this fall and spoke at The Other Side)

So, one way we deal with that layer of unconscious, inappropriate anger is to direct it at the poor, and at the welfare system that, simplistically speaking, perpetuates their poverty. ( Not that this isn’t a genuine problem, mind you, but if you compare defense spending to welfare spending, its clear that helping the poor hardly compares to the non-constructive drain on our economy that war is) Another way that is increasingly prevalent and influential in today’s politics is “red state-blue state” anger, continuously whipped into a frenzy by Glenn Beck types and tea party activists.

As far as I am concerned, however, these anger targets are distractions. They work admirably to keep us away from both more intimate angers, and from our legitimate anger at the people actually in charge of the society and the economic order who benefit from war, from oil drilling that leads to catastrophic oil spills, from factory food that makes us and the planet sick and abuses animals, from seed patents and the rest.

It’s the intimate anger I want to look at first, because this anger is the key to the kind of spiritual transformation that Woodman speaks about and works for. Speaking for myself, it is terribly easy for me to walk around carrying a load of anger that is completely unnoticeable to myself (meaning, its unconscious). Even though this load of unconscious anger cuts me off from feeling real joy and well-being, I can function under it, and I am used to it. Buried anger was something I carried with me as a girl brought up to be above all nice, through my childhood, teen years, and right on through until I faced it, when I was in my early 40’s. By then it had reached lethal levels, as one can imagine, and it took quite a long and painful process to identify it and to transform it. But that is another story, one I have told in other settings.

Through therapy, I came to understand the anger as having originated in very early childhood trauma, the consequence of my parents’ 1000 ways of mis-recognizing me, and failing to love me as I wanted to be loved. The anger had made me ill, not because the anger was wrong, but because of the forbiddenness of the anger. Recovery of my legitimate anger through therapy was one important step in the recovery of my soul. The discovery of my innerness, my soul dimension, was the most important discovery of my life, bar none. Because of the discovery of this priceless pearl, my legitimate anger, no longer directed at my parents, is saved for that which destroys soul – the body-nature-feminine-hating culture that forced my parents’ adaptation, and forces all peoples’ adaptation who have lost their spiritual base, to its supreme authority.

The danger with anger is that, living in this culture that denies the sacred dimension, it goes unconscious and slips back into finding easier targets. Thus it comes to pass that the only means I have for recognizing my unconscious anger is being aware of it in relation to my husband. I cannot exaggerate how comfortably my anger comes to rest at his feet, for all the ways in which he doesn’t suit me, doesn’t see me, doesn’t listen to me, takes me for granted, etc. To the extent that I am aware of the anger, it appears completely justified. “I could have done better,” as Marion Woodman said at one point in relation to her husband. If I am to discern this anger that is hardening my heart toward the one I am – in a completely factual way - closest to in the world, certain conditions must be met

First of all, if I am to recognize this hardened layer in my being I cannot be strenuously busy. In fact, if I wanted to remain thoroughly unconscious of this anger, all I’d have to do is remain busy in the modern, multi-tasking, hurried-up sense. Given my husband’s ancient pattern of accommodating to angry, unhappy parents, with which he is utterly familiar, if we are both sufficiently busy it could take months before the pattern is discerned

Second condition that has to be met is letting go of certainty, allowing in doubt. The crack in the surface is there, but I don’t want to look. I am wielding anger at him, and I know from past experience that I must look at whether or not it is legitimate. Here is the moment at which a huge unwillingness to admit wrong appears, a stiff resistance to humility. Again, based upon past experience, having “been here” before, and knowing how I should proceed against my nature at this moment - which is bidding me to stay angry – I suggest we need to talk, or make some other grudging acknowledgment that I want something else to exist between us. Stubborn as the old unconscious anger is, I can’t even acknowledge this at first - can’t bear the thought of conceding the righteous position to him.

These are the necessary steps leading to reconciliation, an act taken so seriously in Roman Catholic tradition that it is a sacrament. (formerly known as the sacrament of Confession) It has its versions in the other major traditions as well, and is essential as the means whereby the community heals its wounds. The consequences of making this reconciliation, vs. not making it, are enormous. A huge consequence for me of staying in my anger is that, stockaded against Orin, fully armed with my projection on him, and unwilling to acknowledge his human side, my own genuine masculine, initiatory, decisive energy is unavailable to me. I am stuck in the mud of the negative feminine. All progress I have made toward being a woman who makes her own original contributions to the world, are a consequence of this process of taking back my angry projections upon my husband.

So, I wonder, what happens to people who do not have this intimate enemy with whom they must either make peace or remain at war? How do they, if they are women, manage to unlock that ready anger at the Father, at the masculine gods, that we were all steeped in for so long as children in a patriarchal, rigidly sexist order? Who would put herself through such a difficult, humiliating and unpleasant ordeal if some other did not call her to a greater honesty even than she feels capable of? And the “other” I refer to is not the husband per se, but the marriage itself, the quality of the invisible bond between us, so real and so easily severable?

In a culture that is trained not to see such invisible (spiritual) bonds there is no reason to keep them when those points of “irreconcilable difference” are reached. Far be it from me to say whether or not truly irreconcilable differences exist, but given a 50% divorce rate, there are a fair number of couples abandoning the marriage bond because they can, not because it was demanded by the situation, however much a crisis that situation is. My answer to this would be not to toughen divorce laws, but to teach more accurately what marriage is, which is an opportunity to transform spiritually, alchemically, like no other offered to us in modern society. Marriage is, properly understood, a door into the spirit world, a passage not made except inasmuch, by serious pain, we are forced.

Fortunate indeed are we whose pain forces us to find that third way, that door hidden from our ordinary consciousness and sight. Living intimately with another person, committed in the vow of marriage, places one’s ego in real jeopardy. Placed in close confines to real difference, the ego must adjust, that is yield, or continue to demand having its own way. Given the many distractions of modern life, from extreme busyness, to TV’s in every room, to shopping, texting, and the like, not to mention chemical substances, the confrontation is postponable, but at some point, after sufficient postponement, the marriage is completely void. If, on the other hand, one takes on the reality of the difference between man and woman, masculine and feminine, as Marion and her husband Ross did, then one sees that marriage is exactly a vessel for transformation of consciousness. One can take it as that or not, but the difference in “the road taken” is real.

What I want to suggest further is the consequence to our society that by and large we refuse the cup of transformation. We refuse that death Marion spoke about, and thus we refuse that renewed life as well. We refuse the confined space of marriage as “optional misery” we refuse the confine of age, protesting, “I’m not old!”. We refuse the limitations of children by hiring nannies, sending them to day care, and by offering them up to television and the public schools that make them into the kind of people our consumer society wants and needs them to be.

One consequence is that our native anger does not reach its proper outlet, which is revolution. It is revolution because the system we are in, which denies the reality of, and profits from, the extinction of souls, must be replaced. Not by “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” but by utterly new life, the kind attainable by means of spiritual transformation only, which is transformation of imagination.

The anger that we legitimately have, for what has been done to our society, to community, to vulnerable peoples and to the planet, must find its partner love, so that the ancient practice of war can be transformed into, not war against them, but war on behalf of that which cannot speak for itself. This may not be a war of literal killing as much as of voluntary dying so the new life can be born and be. I can find no apter prototype for this kind of transformation of war than the battleground of the genders, and the archetypal masculine and feminine aspects of the soul, in marriage.

Like Marion Woodman, I want to encourage the young not to abandon marriage. I want to ask of “the aging population,” of which I am a member, that we see through the trap of our own liberal smugness, which is as big an obstacle to planetary transformation as right-wing fundamentalist blame-throwing. The fact that alchemical, initiatory containers, such as marriage and religion, resemble the tyrannies and dogmas from which we have historically freed ourselves through enlightenment and technological progress, does not make them optional. And if we do not consciously make our way into these containers to learn the humbling process of dying and being reborn, we will keep the knife at the throat of the one in us who does not deserve to die. The story we tell ourselves may be anti-war, but the killing will continue.