Eros and Strife ~ Peace: A Beginning

CHAPTER TWELVE -

~ In the Wake of Poseidon ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Eros and Strife | pg. 2 - Peace: A Beginning | pg. 3 - Pictures of a City
pg. 4 - Cadence and Cascade | pg. 5 - In the Wake of Poseidon I | pg. 6 - In the Wake of Poseidon II
pg. 7 - Cat Food | pg. 8 - The Devil's Triangle | pg. 9 - Garden of Worm
pg. 10 - Peace: An End

site index

The night sounds preceding Twenty First Century Schizoid Man suggest the womb and Peace: A Beginning , with it's striking evocation of silence and insularity, clearly asserts this same idea. The second album, like the first, begins in the womb, the sheltering womb of rebirth wherein all needs are met..

"The soul can be seen as one who does not desire and love that does not want because there is nothing it does not have. It exists in the original state of oneness where thinking, feeling, and sensation are merged and unconscious, described in mythology as Paradise."

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

And the second album continues from the end of the first - for it is the same Divine Child, born at the end of In the Court of the Crimson King , who speaks the first words of Peace: A Beginning .

"Every creation depends first on a destruction: Time cannot exist without a concept of eternity: The word is born out of silence. What is visible was first invisible. The feminine principle was associated with the dark and shadow side of God, later personified as Eve, the Mother of all the living. It is the Divine Child, as a symbol of the middle, that connects the two opposites and represents them as two aspects, one masculine and one feminine, of one undivided God in the form of the Divine Child God (Puer Aeternus).
Love is the double-edged sword that severs and unites and can be seen as the Divine Child and the human child. (Most Divine Children in mythology are portrayed as having a double nature, for example, Hermes.)"

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

"Puer Aeternus was a child-god identified with Dionysus and the god Eros. He is the "eternal youth", who is born in the night in the midst of the ancient mother-cult mystery of Eleusis. He is destined to become redeemer of humanity. "

- From Psychology to Psychosophy

"The oldest mythology makes Eros the firstborn of Chaos.

Eros, the wild one who tames, is the door through which
the artist returns to Chaos, the One, and then
re-returns, comes back again, bearing one of the
patterns of beauty."

- Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy

"I am the ocean
Lit by the flame
I am the mountain
Peace is my name
I am the river
Touched by the wind
I am the story
I never end."

The Divine Child, within whom all of the elements (psychological functions) work together as one, is presented here, not as the finished product (the end of the quest) but rather as a glimpse of the goal: the ideal of wholeness.

“In the psychology of the individual, the ‘child’ paves the way for a future change of personality. In the individuation process, it anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality. It is therefore a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole.”

- C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 164.

The album's recurring Peace theme represents one side of the ebb and flow of Eros, the "I do not desire", or the higher aspect of Eros. The divine child, from a psychological standpoint, is equivalent to the infant whose needs are met, the temporarily unified psyche of the individual.

There is something strangely familiar about Greg Lake's vocal in Peace: A Beginning . His vocal delivery here sounds strikingly similar to the chorus of I Talk to The Wind . This is the voice of Eros. The same Eros that had been buried in the unconscious in the first album, the same voice that had been the shadow in the first album, is now out in the open, conscious. The "ocean" in Peace: A Beginning , is the contents of the unconscious. The implication here is that the protagonist is now going to have to consider his feelings, the light and the dark, the high and the low, the "I do not desire" and the "I desire" aspects of Eros. The "flame" is the divine Logos (Thinking with Feeling) born (discovered within) at the end of the last album.

"The material aspect of the Logos is fire (aither), the highest and most pure form of matter. It is not an actual flame or visible glow, but rather an invisible vapor which is immanent."

- Heraclitus: Logos and Reality as Dynamic

The "mountain" is the Self which, once realized, brings peace (wholeness) to the individual. The "river", being water, is another symbol of the unconscious. The "river touched by the wind" is the unconscious (Eros, the Feeling function) touched by consciousness (Logos, the Thinking function). But the "river" also brings us back to Heraclitus.

"For Heraclitus, everything is in this process of flux, and nothing therefore, not even the world in its momentary form, nor the gods themselves, can escape final destruction. That will apply to the world at large (macrocosm) and also to the soul of humans (microcosm). Concerning the larger world...

'You cannot step twice into the same river.'

Concerning the human soul, it is just as true that 'we are and are not' at any given moment. As fire changes continually into water and then into earth, so earth changes back to water and water again to fire. The world, therefore, arose from fire, and in alternating periods is resolved again into fire, to form itself anew out of this element. The division of unified things into a multiplicity of opposing phenomena is "the way downwards," and is the consequence of a war and a strife. Harmony and peace lead back to unity by "the way upwards." Nature is constantly dividing and uniting herself, so that the multiplicity of opposites does not destroy the unity of the whole."

- Heraclitus

The "story" that "never ends" is the Individuation process, the ongoing alchemical union of the opposites of conscious and unconscious.

A close listen to the last two lines of Peace: A Beginning reveals the voice becoming more immediate, the insularity of the womb dissapearing, the divine child, Eros, rising to consciousness. But Eros, as Jung said, is "a questionable fellow and will always remain so . . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body". With Pictures of a City , the peace of the womb is shattered by Eros itself, and the Divine Child is re-born into the grasping materialism of the modern distopia.

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