THe Cost of Mechination

The cost of machination is the sacrifice of the feminine. The cost of taking the easy route such as with the character of Peter Sarsgaard is sacrifice of the feminine but not in him, in those around him. He is the master of the feelings realm, the arts, the carefree life represented by Paris but what he lacks her father carrries, the senex, the sense of rules and responsibility and money doesn’t grow on trees and you have to work for it. But he is all too willing to sacrifice his dream of her going to college. He is as captivated by Paul as his daughter. The parents have sacrificed that part of themselves long ago and that part remains unresolved, unintegrated and it remains in shadow until Paul constellated that part of the them and led to the parents betrayal of the daughter. It reminds us how easy we can be tricked by someone who can tap into that lost self.

And what of loss. The incredible alchemical plates of Lucius signify a process that has captivated me. I believe it has to do with transformation but different from the Rosarium. A king is no longer listening to his servants as they are beseeching him. They are in want. One wonders if this is similar to the themes in fairytales in which desire and want are evident from the beginning of the story, such as Rapunzel and the desire for rapion and in Godfather Death and the desire for a godfather for his son. The want in our alchemical image is for a new king or a new view of the world, a new attitude toward the world. In modern times this desire is usually acted out and leads to change but at a very high price. The very public affairs and betrayals seen in the media are attempts, misguided as they are, at change or transformation. The psyche does not understand this need nor how to meet it. We have no road maps for this change. We think that all change comes from without, not from within, so live by those rules and end up acting out a dynamic that can be characterized as betrayal in order to precipitate change from within.

Let us look deeper. The son steps up to kill the king. This is not left to anyone else. The son kills the king is a very deep psychic need reflective of Freud, yet the son also represents the new moving forward to replce the old. A father feels this in his son, that he is there to replace him. This is very primordial and the father's usual reaction is anger and defensiveness and at worst, a father's excuse to destroy the son psychologically if not physically as in the case of physical abuse. But this death is not out of anger or hatred. It is very prescribed and serious. Upon the death of the king the son places the blood of the father on his own clothes. This act acknowledges the son's ownership of the death. He takes responsibility for this death and does not deny it. Human nature is very resistant to acknowledging a death that one has psychologically particpated in so this ownership is essential.

Then the son must bury the father, the king. The new buries the old but in the act of burial the son reluctantly follows his father into the tomb. We are told in the alchemical text the the son's movement into the tomb was aided by the art of the alchemist. One replaces alchemist with therapist and we see the therapist as an important component of moving the patient toward this burial, this movement into the grave where the old and the new go through a period of "incubation" together. So we cling to the old for a period of time. This is mourning.