Dark Night of the Soul : Cirkus

Dark Night of the Soul

"For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as I am known."

~ Saint Paul

"If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance... It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse."

- Bachelard

"Every venture one's life may repeat
Masnavi's purpose is the Great Defeat.
Set afire, burning with cleansing heat,
On the anvil, egos ply and beat.
This book, if you open, read, entreat
Your life, a mendicant's, in the street."

- Rumi, Introduction to Mathnavi

"Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves,
the tides, and gravity,
we shall harness the energies of love....
Then, for the second time in the history of the world,
humanity will have discovered fire."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Lizard
pg. 2 - Cirkus | pg. 3 - Megaphonium Fanfare
pg. 4 - 'Worship!' Cried the Clown | pg. 5 - Entry of the Chameleons
pg. 6 - Indoor Games | pg. 7 - Happy Family
pg. 8 - Lady of the Dancing Water

- page index -
Twin Serpents

site index

"Three is a moving forward of energy, overcoming duality, expression, manifestation and synthesis. Three is the first number to which the meaning "all" was given. It is The Triad, being the number of the whole as it contains the beginning, a middle and an end.

Three is birth, life, death. Three is a complete cycle unto itself. It is past, present, future.

The symbol of three is the triangle."

- Numerology

...and The Devil's Triangle depicts "overcoming duality".

The Three Forms of Knowledge

"There are three forms of knowledge. The first is intellectual knowledge, which is in fact only information and the collection of facts, and the use of these to arrive at further intellectual concepts. This is intellectualism.

Second comes the knowledge of states, which includes both emotional feeling and strange states of being in which man thinks that he has perceived something supreme but cannot avail himself of it. This is emotionalism.

Third comes real knowledge, which is called the Knowledge of the Reality. In this form, man has perceived what is right, what is true, beyond the boundaries of thought and sense. Scholastics and scientists concentrate on the first form of knowledge. Emotionalist and experientialists use the second form. Others use the two combined, or either one alternately.

But the people who attain to truth are those who know how to connect themselves with the reality which lies beyond both these forms of knowledge. These are the real Sufis, the Dervishes who have Attained."

- Ibn al Arabi, Sufi mystic and a contemporary of Frederick II
from: Shaw, Idries. The Way of the Sufi. (New York: E. P. Dutton), 1970

he first album, In the Court of the Crimson King , dealt with intellectual knowledge and the second album, In the Wake of Poseidon , with emotionalism. The third album, Lizard , addresses this area of the truth "which lies beyond both these forms of knowledge".
But how does one find the reality that lies "beyond the boundaries of thought and sense"?
By addressing the third of Jung's psychological functions, Sensation.

The goal of individuation (and of the Sinfield albums) is the unification of all four psychological functions in the fourth function, Intuition (Jung's quaternity: 3+1).

"The four ways of interpreting reality are the four "ego-functions" - Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition. These consist of two diametrically-opposed pairs. So, suggests Jung, if a person has the Thinking function (an analytical, "head"-type way of looking at the world) highly developed, the Feeling function (the empathetic, value-based "heart"-type way of looking at things) will be correspondingly underveloped, and in fact suppressed. The same goes for Sensation and Intuition. Sensation is orientation "outward" to physical reality, and Intuition "inward" to psychic reality."

- The Four Ego Functions

"...what is important is the idea that we are always perceiving on two levels and in two ways, and the first way is limited compared with the second way, which duly reports or perceives what is going on, whether we will it or not. In other words, the body is always in relationship to the surrounding world, as well as the inner world..."

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

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In the Court of the Crimson King and In the Wake of Poseidon dealt with the first of these two diametrically opposed pairs, Thinking and Feeling (also the first two of Ibn al Arabi's "Three Forms of Knowledge"). The other opposed pair, Sensation and Intuition, is the subject of the third King Crimson album, Lizard .

"Salamander
The name given by the medieval fire-philosophers to the nature spirits of fire, the fire elementals. The Greek salamandra meant a lizard-like animal believed to have power over and hence to extinguish fire -- or to produce it."

- Encyclopedic Theosophical Glossary: Sa-Sal

The Salamander, or Lizard, like Eros, has a dual nature and represents both Sensation and Intuition, orientation "outward" towards physical reality and "inward" towards psychic reality. If you recall from chapter four, in antiquity the word "worm" could be used in reference to either a snake or a dragon (lizard). Thus, the "Lizard" of the third King Crimson album could refer to any reptilian creature (i.e. a snake).

"Creatures associated wth fire:
Snakes, lizards, scorpions, lions, phoenix"

- Fire

"The twin serpents of intuition and sensation stand alone as separate functions, as Jung described, and appear as opposites of one another. All extreme opposites necessarily depend on one another and are connected to one another; the psychological functions of sensation and intuition, as well as feeling and thinking, are no exception.

Campbell (1964) describes the ancient image of the Serpent Lord:

'There is in the Louvre a carved green steatite vase, inscribed c. 2025 B.C. by King Gudea of Lagash, dedicated to a late Sumerian manifestation of this consort of the goddess, under his title Ningizzida, "Lord of the Tree of Truth." Two copulating vipers, entwined along a staff in the manner of the caduceus of the Greek god of mystic knowledge and rebirth, Hermes, are displayed through a pair of opening doors, drawn back by two winged dragons of a type known as the lion-bird.'

The winged dragons or lion-birds, which are equivalent to cherubs or angels link this image to the much later archetype of Lucifer, the favorite angel of God, who is transformed into the rejected child or angel and is seen as a serpent. Both images of serpent and angel appear in the later Paradise myth, the Serpent as the deceiver of Adam and Eve and the Lion-birds as the angels or cherubim who guard the entrance to Paradise with flaming swords.

The motif of the twin vipers or the Serpent's Bride... is an ancient image that appears to be related to the much later image of an angel falling out of Heaven into Hell or the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise to the earthly realm of human struggle.

As the favorite angel, the Divine Child, Lucifer was one with God and lived in that middle place where consciousness and unconsciousness are not separated, but exist as one. For this reason, I equate Lucifer in his Divine Child aspect with the psychological function of intuition, which I understand to be all the functions existing as one undifferentiated function. When he falls from Heaven, Lucifer becomes the fallen angel turned Serpent, or the function of conscious sensation.

It is the function of Sensation that provides the newborn infant with evidence of his separateness in the world. In the Genesis myth this is represented by the Serpent (Sensation) offering the apple to Eve (Feeling). The Feeling function (Eve) then experiences the Sensation of separateness as either "good" or "bad" and the Thinking function consciously elucidates the Feeling as an idea (Eve offering the apple to Adam)."

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

In the newborn infant, the psychological functions are differentiated (split) from the whole in the same order (described above) given in the Garden of Eden story. In the first four King Crimson albums this order is reversed, the first psychological function dealt with being the last to have been differentiated by the newborn infant. In the Court of the Crimson King addresses the problem of Thinking over-shadowing Feeling while In the Wake of Poseidon explores the reverse, the Feeling function's predominance over Thinking. The problem of Lizard is the third function, Sensation, the fallen angel, the greatest obstacle to Intuition.

"The primary function of intuition is simply to transmit images, or perceptions of relations between things, which could not be transmitted by the other functions or only in a very roundabout way. These images have the value of specific insights which have a decisive influence on action whenever intuition is given priority. In this case, psychic adaptation will be grounded almost entirely on intuitions. Thinking, feeling, and sensation are then largely repressed, sensation being the one most affected, because, as the conscious sense function, it offers the greatest obstacle to intuition. Sensation is a hindrance to clear, unbiassed, naive perception; its intrusive sensory stimuli direct attention to the physical surface, to the very things round and beyond which intuition tries to peer."

- C.G. Jung, 1971/21

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