The Lizard in the Fire Chapter 05 Running with the Wildman. The Wildman version.

Sorry, this was supposed to appear last week. Tech failure.

Chapter 05 “Running with the Wildman”. Wildman Version.

Back to our narrative 

“one day he found the sign of a strange animal. It was one his father had never taught him. He tracked it to a watering hole and found her a Wildman. He crouched at the water’s edge with long tangled hair all over his body. The Wildman saw the boy and said, “Run with me boy” “We can run all day you and I”. The boy replied, “you are the wild man my father spoke of, saying that if I run with you, I will die”. Well, that could be so” said the Wildman “It’s your decision” The boy decided to run with the Wildman and so they did.  But it wasn’t long before the boy died”.

Our father had warned us. If we run with the Wildman we will die. But how are we to understand this? What is meant by death in this context?

Remember the ending of the story.

Then the Crone took the lizard and threw it into the fire and spoke. “If someone brave enough to retrieve the lizard the boy will come back to life.

The father stepped forward and tried to enter the flames to retrieve the Lizard, but the heat was too much, and he was pushed back. The mother did the same. No one else in the village tried.

Then the Wildman stepped up saying. “This is the fire I am made of—this fire is in me”. The Wildman leapt into the fire grabbed the Lizard and leapt out again.

The Lizard was still intact, the child (us) came back to life and stood beside the fire in front of the Crone.

The Crone then says to (us)  “You have a choice to make, if you cast the Lizard into the fire and leave it to burn, the Wildman will live, but you will have to leave this village and never see your father and mother again.

or take this Lizard and carry it with you for the rest of your life as the Wildman but the one who saved you from the fire will die.

The Crone gives the Lizard to the boy. “It’s time to decide”.

What would you do?

What are you going to do?

These are some of the questions that the narrative raises.

What is meant by “Death” in such a story?

What does it mean to discover the Wildman?

What is implied by the conscious choice for the boy/us to run with the Wildman and risk death.

What does it mean to run with the Wildman?

What is happening while the boy is “Dead”?

Stepping out into life, we have to let go of our protective shell of childhood a sort of death, a sort of dying to yesterday to accept tomorrow.

Death in a story of this nature does not mean a physical death as our Ego would understand it. Death means the end of a process. like growing into adulthood and the marking into our individual consciousness the communities acknowledgment of that passage. Much of the initiation process is designed to lift us out of childhood into adulthood. That is the death described here, a divorce, losing your job, losing a loved one, having a near-death experience are all psychological deaths designed to pop us out of the comfort of our Ego shell. Like the chick on the left, we need to leave that protection behind us. If we carry that time expired shell with us into adulthood we become Children in adult bodies.

Like Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme below, we will never be the same again and we cannot go backward except in extreme psychological and mental situations.

An old English nursery Rhyme full of political meaning about that time, about fence-sitters and timing. We talk about falling..in love. like young birds sooner or later we must test our wings or die.

What does it mean to discover the Wildman? We know from the narrative that our own father warned us against the Wildman. Not so much that he didn’t take us to the forest, as he and our mother decided to do, accepting the risk and probability of us meeting the Wildman. Our father didn’t show us his tracks in the forest, nor did he give us any teaching about this Wildman other than the threat of death. Our personal father is in denial and says effectively “I don’t know anything about it” The Wildman is then like a taboo no one speaks about, but everybody knows something about it. It is called “Soul”. This the state of our culture for the most part. This is certainly the teaching of the status quo. Most religions are not too keen on their congregants claiming they are children of God. To speak about the Wildman is to speak about the Divine about as close as we can come when we are incarnate. This Wildman is the missing Father James Hillman speaks of.

It’s a bit like in the Bluebeard story giving his new wife the keys to all the rooms in the castle and then instructing her never on pain of death to use the small key. Human beings it seems are programmed to ignore good advice.

This whole experience in the forest is a process of revealing to us who we are. Also, the story is talking to both sides of us simultaneously. The Ego of our everyday understanding and our Soul, The Soul that created the crisis that required us to go to the forest in the first place. However, our Soul is not finished with us as we will see, hold on tightly to this idea of Soul as the creator of crisis as the narrative unfolds.

Which brings us back to the question of why our father/parents/community/religions, doesn’t tell us about the Wildman? Well, the first difficulty is we generally associated the God Pan with the devil.  We see the same problem in the Jack and the beanstalk story where the giant extracted a promise from our mother never to reveal who our father is and who our mother really is.

In our world, it seems we have all more or less agreed on a lie. That we are children of our physical parents and their family line and ancestors are ours and that defines who we are.

However, that is only partly true. Our Soul springs from eternity, outside of clock time, and is divine in nature. And is always trying to initiate us more fully into life. However, there comes a point in this initiation process where we die to what we were before and take on a different life underpinned by a new understanding. In the Christian story when Jesus left the tomb his disciples did not recognise him and demanded proof. Revealed by pierced hands, feet, and a wound to the side. Such was the transformation.

Think of the young boy who leaves a small village and goes to the city to get a degree. By the time he attains his degree, his values and understanding of the world has undergone a radical shift. How easy is it for the villagers he left behind to relate to the person he is now, on his return home? And vice versa. This dilemma, the rest of the story will lay out for us.

The Wildman is the consort of the Great Mother, both of nature and the creativity she stands for. Even our physical body she lends us for a time to experience this school called earth. The Wildman protects the inner forest from intruders who would apply their Ego understanding on what they see and experience there. To see the Wildman is not so much a case of being at the right place at the right time. It rather a matter of awareness, which only comes from living in the forest for some time alone. To see the Wildman is a gift of our Soul. To take us to the next step.

Running with the Wildman. Such a strange expression, “to run with the Wildman” means to be with him as he goes about his day and his duties. The Wildman offered us a day. “The Wildman saw the boy and said, “Run with me boy” “We can run all day you and I”.

Of course, a day in the life of a story could be a very long time or a very short time. Then there is the difficulty of death as warned by the father. “you are the wild man my father spoke of, saying that if I run with you, I will die”. Well, that could be so” said the Wildman “It’s your decision.”

Death and decisions again. To run with the Wildman is to be in the proximity of something almost divine. There is a short Rumi poem that describes this perfectly. Sometimes the guest in eastern poetry is referred to as the divine.

Rumi:

I want to kiss you. (the divine)

The Price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running towards my life shouting.

Let’s take it what a bargain.

The Wildman in other forms as the God Pan.

Here is an image of the God Pan from antiquity from the story of “The wind in the willows” If you have young children, I recommend it, maybe read this book to them it is enchanting. Many versions miss out Chapter 7 because of the association of Pan with the devil. Try to get a version with chapter 7 in it.      

In the Greek myths, some of the female lovers of Zeus, the King of Mount Olympus demanded that he reveal himself to them, which he reluctantly did, those who saw him were turned to ash. A human being is not designed to take that much divine energy all at once That is why it takes some time for the Wildman to appear in the story and the warning that to run with him is death.

Here is another poem that describes this difficulty.

Bread and wine by Fredrick Holderlin.

Oh, Friends we arrived too late. The divine energies are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypical world.

They keep on going there, and apparently, don’t bother if humans live or not…….and that is a heavenly mercy.

Sometimes a human’s clay is not strong enough to take the divine water. Human beings can carry the divine only sometimes.

What is living now? Night dreams of them. But craziness helps, so does sleep. Grief and night toughen us.

Until people capable of sacrifice once more rock in the iron cradle, desire people, like the ancients, strong enough for that water

In thunderstorms it will arrive. I have the feeling often meanwhile it is better to sleep, since the guest comes so seldom; we waste our lives waiting, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to act or talk…in the lean years who needs poets??

But poets as you say are like the holy disciple of the wild one. The one who used to stroll over the fields and through the enormous forest through the whole divine night.

So perhaps we see now that to run with the Wildman indeed is a death in our Ego world but holds extraordinary promises in the divine world. This is the choice the Wildman offers. “if I run with you, I will die”. Well, that could be so” said the Wildman “It’s your decision.”  (“let’s do it what a bargain”)

The rest of the story deals with this decision and the outcomes of that decision.

So now the boy in the story is dead and doesn’t come back to life until the Lizard is in the Fire. However, we are not there yet. We will look at what this experience of death is about in the next Chapter.

The Lizard in the Fire Chapter 06 Death and the night-sea journey.

This is perhaps the most enigmatic part of the story and is seemingly inconsequential. The boy has died, and the Wildman carries us via the Great Mother to the village fire.

This time of experiencing death is most important if we are to understand the rest of the story. This time of death refers to the Night-sea-Journey or the descent in the Hero’s Journey.

Previous Chapter 04

Regards Samuel 30/5/21