“The Half Giantess” Chapter 01 The Parents house.

The Half Giantess: Unpacking the bones.

The Half Giantess story: Escaping from the parents’ house.

Tags: Escaping the parents’ home, Taboo, Fair play, justice, denial, repression, local myths, Culture, violence, be nice, self-mutilation, tears, anger, rage, fear, The long bag, shadow, acceptable, rejected, Status Quo,

The Parents House in this world.

The Castle Quo. Status Quo.

The creation of Ego

Creation of persona.

Or.

Who, what, and where we incarnate into. In the Western world anyway? 

One of the difficulties for us in working with these stories is that we believe life and our journey into begins at birth and ends at death, this causes us to see life from a very limited point of view, while consensus reality is a powerful influence on our beliefs it can be dangerously limiting, not long ago the consensus was that the world was flat, people actually died for holding the belief that the world was round. well, round was one thing spherical was quite another.

The fact that we are here and able to read this shows that we have incarnated into a physical body, Rudolf Steiner and the Waldorf schooling system have made a study of this process and geared the Waldorf curriculum around this understanding.   One of the great understandings of the Waldorf schooling system is that the incarnation process is an incremental one and doesn’t finish until the age of 29 years or so. Many of the stories the Waldorf system uses describes this process in metaphor to assist the developing child. Offering the children what they need as their being unfolds.  I will unpack this whole idea in a separate post.

 

The car race metaphor. Consider we are watching a car race, we can only see our part of the track, we watch the cars come past on each lap and we create an order that the cars pass from our point of view, then on the next lap the previous leader is suddenly last all battered and bent. We don’t see or understand what happened we only see the mangled car going past, now last. Like the car race, our limited view of life distorts our understanding of what life brings us, most of all it distorts our understanding of cause and effect because now, we must turn ourselves inside out to find causes and attribute effects from this limiting point of view. This is especially true of issues around death and birth. Psychology, coaching, and physical limitations.

However, if we were in a helicopter and were able to view the whole race at once, then our understanding of the struggling battered car would be different. We would understand the how and why of the crash and the context of how and why that car was last.

The “Parents house ” is a Consensus reality  A flat world. where what consensus is imposed on the growing child and agreed on by the rest of us. This reality is the mythical waters we swim in like the discworld of Terry Pratchett. We have to be looking from left to right to see what everybody else is doing, indeed corporations and countries have small armies of people whose job it is to spy on others so we can know what they are doing. and looking to the future straight ahead to keep our eyes on the ball. We imagine the future is in front of us and the past behind us. Consensus bias is now a studied thing in a world of fake news. This is a flat world.

Vertical Thought  Even the world’s two major religions are now caught up in a form of consensus reality fight and are now prepared to kill each other over their held beliefs. Indeed in Ireland, we were prepared to kill each other over a different version of the same belief, reality or consensus. 

Poets understand this dilemma, here is what these two poets had to say about this.

I am not a mechanism by D. H. Lawerence

(When Euclid set out to measure Hades. By Harry Martinson )

A view of life from both worlds. This story the half giantess more than many others stories, straddles both worlds, the world we live in, the one we call reality, and the otherworld the one that stands just outside this one, the one we came from and the one we will return to when we die. Just a belief away. This story stems from the other world and its point of view, it gives a glimpse into this world from that point of view, the world we have incarnated into. The story has left signposts for us to follow so we can understand what we are seeing.

“The Parents House”

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” ― Carl Jung

This is a huge chunk to understand just what “the parents’ house” encompasses. Robert Bly approaches this from the point of view that parents want a nice boy or a nice girl. Because the child is dependent on the parents for love and nurturing. There is a willingness to find ways of expressing ourselves to please the parents. An incarnating child has the capacity to incarnate anywhere in the world into all cultures and languages, it’s a sort of one size fits all.  As Bly sets out, we incarnate as this 360-degree being, by the time we are three or four we are down to about 20% of what we entered with. There are other understandings of this Halfness which I have chosen not to go into from this point of departure, Ego’s creation. Michael Meade in his book “The Waters of Life” have laid out the deep psychic reality of the deep waters we fell into as we incarnated, and our fight to swim across the river of forgetfulness called Lathos in Greek mythology. Lathos is where we get our English word lethargic from

 

This lit part becomes the Ego and by reaction, the personality is formed.

The parts that are praised and accepted by the parents become the ego of the incarnating child, what the child learns to identify with. The child’s wish to hide the unaccepted parts, which it resists putting in the bag, creates the persona, the mask we wear to cover what we are taught are taboos, and our inadequacies. In this way “the parents’ house” is a construct of the parent’s love and need for the incarnating child to successfully navigate the world it entered. This construct is also driven by where the parents fit into the surrounding culture and where that fits into the rest of the world often.

Of ancestors, family lines, and duality of purpose. We assume that our ancestors are the ancestors of the current family line. This may not always be the case, nor may we always be the same sex in successive incarnations. Incarnations are planned in the other world with mentoring from older Souls who, advise on the where and to whom we need to incarnate into, to best serve the experiences we need at that time. Some compromise is required here, and so some of the energy we incarnate with, that we need for our life purpose, we resist putting in the bag, we just pretend we have, and so the persona is created, how we want to be seen vs. How we are.

These split-off parts. of the being do not die, they go and continue living in the unconscious, in the other world slowly regressing becoming angry and ugly. The stories such as the “Laidley Worm,” and “Never ending story” tells us this and how to do this Soul retrieval. This creates the nemesis for the Ego like the Clown in the Batman movies. In Michael Mead’s book mentioned above he devels deeply into the idea of Halfness. Many African stories speak of this halfness, these stories are now obscure, I live in Johannesburg South Africa, and when I ask African friends about these storied they have no memory of them. As our culture descends into materiality we lose the wisdom of these old stories to shape our lives.

These split-off parts become our personal Shadows and collective Shadows. Taboos become our collective Shadows. If we are now only 20% of our original selves that we came with, then the bag (shadow) is quite full and busy containing the other 80%. Like a bag full of cats all trying to escape at once, full of claws, teeth, and howling. 

Myths serve us by creating order out of chaos. In the sense that for the young and parentally dependent Ego, the parents represent at once protection and a holder of the collective Myths of their culture. It is the parent’s job to socialize the child, and the young ego into the culture to be safe, every parent wants their children to be successful even to have the success they themselves could not achieve. The Myth of every culture tells us how to be safe and acceptable in that culture. When our behavior and expression align with the local culture we are heaped with praise, love, and acceptability.

The Role of Denial and Repression as the Creator of Taboo:

When a behavior doesn’t align with accepted ideas then that praise is withheld, and life is made uncomfortable even to the extreme of death or banishment. Our Local Myths, therefore, contains all the denied, repressed content as taboos. In a healthy culture, there are rituals and processes to deal with taboo content, in an unhealthy culture it is done by Denial, repression, intimidation, judgment, and finally a justification for the treatment of “other”

The cost of acceptability.

While I have set out the process of Ego creation as being benign and done with the best of intentions, from the Soul’s point of view this is a violent process. At the age of the terrible two’s, this resistance of Soul is strong, and the outside forces brought to bear on the Ego are immense. Like in the Stockholm Syndrome where the kidnap victim begins to identify with the kidnappers, so to the young dependent Ego identifies with the parents. If you can’t beat them join them and so the journey from Soul to Castle Quo is achieved.  

At the same moment, the will forces of the child can be crushed,  James Hillman also set out the psychodynamic here with the primal meal.

How as parents, caregivers, educators, and peers we roll over the personal boundaries of those considered inferior to us. For our equals and betters, we use humiliation and loss of esteem, even the ability to work and live among us. Try being a CO2 denialist in the scientific community.  Q.E.D.  

 Read Alice Miller “The drama of the gifted child”

 Jean Liedloff in her 1975 book “The continuum concept”

 

The creation of Ego is an act of violence from the Souls’ perspective. When we willingly amputate parts of our selves psychically it is no less painful than if we chopped off an arm or a leg. Usually, these lessons are harsh ones accompanied by shouting, threats, and bullying, often the hurt is turned inwards and directed at ourselves, understanding that we are lacking and somehow unacceptable.

The Lake of Tears. This lake in this story is called the Lake of Tears, it exists in the other world where half-giants walk and drink. These tears are the tears we all shed as we mutilated our whole selves to be acceptable to the Status Quo. This is a particularly enjoyable drink for giants as it confirms their domination over us. Like Jack and the Bean Stalk, “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread”

The long bag we drag behind us. This is an image that resonates with me, a long sleeping bag-like shape where we put all the unacceptable and unwanted stuff. Over time the bag gets heavier and longer. We spend a huge amount of energy towing this bag around, is it any wonder all we want to do is sit in front of the TV every evening and forget? We rely on the mood-altering opiates of our culture to dull the pain. Sometimes when nobody is looking, we go and retrieve something from the bag and act that out in secrete, drinking, sex, gambling, stealing, cheating, etc. The way we act out will be symbolic of what’s in the bag and what the behavior is asking of us. This idea of the “Long Bag we drag behind us” was Robert Bly’s expression.

When the Ego is overlit or overblown (full of it) we temporally take our attention off the supposed non-existent bag. At that moment something from the bag pops out and causes havoc in our life. Always in the service of reminding us of what’s in the bag and that we will have to have a stocktake as we start the journey back to the Soul. 

Who or what is the boy in the story?

The boy in the story is the young Ego of a physical boy or girl. We know while these stories are set in our world, they happen in that magical “other world”. The whole point of this is to enable the Ego to go on a journey to a transpersonal world, to get some perspective and reconnect with Soul. On first reading many of the stories don’t make much sense, they seem to deal with males and boys. Girls need to go on this Journey too, they too need to understand giants, tyrants, and their energies. They need to be forewarned as to what they are going to meet in this physical world. (Link to the journey from Soul to ego, from the enormous forest to the castle quo)

The Narrative ‘The story describes a small boy whose parents are not at home”.

Young children still remember where they came from, when the parents are not at home the constant reinforcing of the local myth, the socializing context for successful ego life temporally stops. There is a moment of grace when the young Ego can reconnect with Soul, the split-off parts, and be reminded of our life’s purpose. The Parsifal Moment. That opening of something within us to the Divine or something Transpersonal. Once touched by the finger of God, our life is never the same and we are blessed with an endless dissatisfaction with the world. This happens around the 13th birthday and would explain teenagers’ deep disdain for the world, their parents, and the domesticating socialising world they find themselves in. In some traditions the indent in the upper lip under the nose is where we were touched by the Divine.

Agreements of the Soul. The old idea was that when a child comes into this world we rejoiced because it was understood that the child brought gifts from the spiritual world to make whole this world, This was a time of great rejoicing and still is, though the reason may be lost. What the child brought with them was called the genius of the child, which was considered separate from Ego. (Michael Meade)

At the core of Parenting is the understanding that genius must be invited out of the person.

“People carry to this world something important that they must deliver, and mentors are the midwives of that genius delivering the genius to the community. To see the genius in a young person is to give it the fertile ground required for it to burst forth and blossom. It is not enough to be born into this world loaded with such beauty. The newborn must be assisted in giving birth to the genius that they are born with. Failure to do so kills that genius along with the person carrying it. The community responsible for the death of an inner genius is like an assassin. The community that can receive the person genius gives birth to the adult who is able to contribute his or her healing gifts to that community”.         (Michael Meade)

These agreements we made before incarnating, how to bring the gifts we brought with us forward into this life, in conjunction with ego. The Soul has an unbelievable capacity to create a crisis for the ego as well as the opportunity for this Soul-ego conversation. This can happen at around 12 or 13 years old; the impact of this meeting can put into motion life’s work for this incarnation.

The story tells us that to go on this journey the boy had to magically escape the confines of the parental home. Now, this is a difficult and courageous thing for a boy or a girl to do. In this story, the parents are not at home unlike the story of Iron John where the boy waited until the parents were away to steal the key. This is a statement true of modern parenting, of emotionally and physically absent fathers, single-parent families often the mother and in South Africa the Grandmothers, the GoGo’s

How to find a hole in the wall of the parent’s house to escape through.

There is a time in a child’s life when a sense of Justice appears, this is a developmental stage of the 12-year-old. A good image of this is the 12-year-old Jesus arguing the law in the temple with the Rabbi.  His own mother did not recognize him at that time. This is the time when the child will become quite open in criticizing and questioning the parents about the difference between what they say and what they do.

It’s about this time when parents become an embarrassment to their children. Drop me off here I’ll walk the last part, don’t kiss or hug me in front of my friends, really? Children begin pushing boundaries, WYSIWYG no longer works. The parents, no longer understand what motivates some behaviors, Children rebel against what they see as unnecessary restriction and hypocrisy. Parents understand the risks of the world and fear for their children, children are innocent and resent what they see as punitive restrictions.

This low-grade war between Parents and teenagers. This can become quite uncomfortable for parents and teenagers. If this process of the child’s questioning is quashed or brutally repressed using shaming manipulation, the sense of Justice in the child will be crippled and may lead to the criminalizing of natural desires and curiosity. Why criminalizing? because curiosity and behaviors may just get pushed underground to maintain acceptability and love. The parent can expect lots of questions about what is legal and what is not and of course, this is a great time to inculcate the values of Justice and fair play.

A child’s sense of Justice and Fair play. When the Parent’s behavior and the conversation fall short of Justice and fair play, the child notices and judge the parents harshly for their hypocrisy. The child at a deep level still remembers the Soul. The parents, the recent arbiters of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable are no longer seen as infallible, the god-like parents crash to earth like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, and may never recover in the eyes of their children unless the parents are humble enough to admit failures and shortcomings, which is after all the whole point of this story.  

The healthiest thing to do is to simply admit the fault.  Hard to do sometimes but vital.  In this way, the most important people in the child’s life confirm their natural sense of Justice.  At the same time, the child learns that failures in this regard can be admitted and that adults while making mistakes can be honest about that.  This confirmation for the growing child is vital and needs to be held sacred by all those in authority.  This would be a seed of the “Valued Citizen” program, this is the way to Kingship.

Narrative: “The boy makes a very small hole in the wall of the parental home and pours himself through it.” Through such a story is the only way a child can break down the wall of denial and step outside to see the Giants safely. (Good, advice as we live in a land of giants and Tyrants.)

The story has the ability to carry the Ego into a realm of Dragons and witches, gods, goddesses, and of course Giants/tyrants.

Giants and Tyrants are the unintended consequence of an excess of free will and a lack of proper initiation. 

This is a point of Initiation for the emerging adolescent. A strong sense of the Masculine world needs to step in and separate the child psychologically from the mother as well as physically for both girls and boys.  We must ask the question where are all the male teachers in our education system? Where are the Masculine role models in our culture?  How are we going to do this work when the Fathers are for the most part absent firstly physically and secondly emotionally?  How are we going to do this when women believe that men are so brutal that they would rather bring up their sons without any male input at all?  We are facing a crisis of Fathering and a hijacking of our education and culture by forces that would rather we remain asleep. (read Giants). Continued Chapter 2