What Is Devouring Our Children?
Kronos and Littleton
Tom Lowe
It can no longer be denied that the recent lamentable events at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, are part of a trend. There are too many common threads that bind together the incidents at Pearl, Jonesboro, West Paducah, Springfield and Littleton to ignore the connection. These are middle-class, wholesome, peaceful, relatively high-quality schools with considerable educational resources, concerned parents and enthusiastic public officials. The killings didn't happen in the so-called "rotting, crime-infested" inner-city schools, where the stereotypes of delinquency and violence are supposed to predominate.
One looks for more than a psychological or sociological explanation. All the preconditions for the killings exist in thousands of other schools throughout the nation. Why haven't the killings occurred sooner and why haven't they occurred at numerous other places? These are not easy questions. Adolescent youth, naturally made insecure by the most profound changes in their bodies and minds that they will ever undergo, are prone to cliques as a means of establishing their identity and obtain a sense of belonging. Rival cliques are common, vying with one another for a position in the inter-clique pecking order. This can be cruel indeed. Among boys, schoolyard bullies and victims are roles as ancient as schools themselves.
The media and their expert sources have drawn several conclusions. Blaine Harden, in The New York Times, reminds us that schools overall are becoming less violent, that killings are becoming less frequent and there is no real reason to worry. Another columnist holds that parents, teachers, relatives, neighbors and friends are not actively engaging sufficiently in the lives of children. Another holds that the student cliques at Columbine High School were so hostile to each other and especially to the students at the bottom of the feeding chain that the outcasts became warped so badly that two of them went on a murderous spree.
All true.
The proposed solutions were equally varied. In a local newspaper, three columnists recently made their recommendations. One suggested that students be required to wear uniforms, as though the abolition of the distinctive dress would effectively abolish the underlying anger. Another advocated the extension of school authority into all avenues of student life. A third one wanted schools to be nicer places but conceded that "Respect, responsibility and caring might not have reached the Littleton killers." None of these are exactly innovative ideas.
The columnists and experts are all practicing allopathic social medicine. Modern medicine is largely allopathic--when a patient is ill, the doctor does "something" to the patient that cures the ill. That something might be an antibiotic, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, or surgery. Medicine assumes that things can be fixed by observing symptoms, comparing the pattern of symptoms to known disorders and then taking the corrective action known in the past to cure the disease. The problem, as any medical doctor will readily admit, is that the allopathic model doesn't always work. Often, patients that are expected to live die and conversely. Medication frequently makes the patient worse from side effects. Patients almost always improve when prescribed placebos. Humans are just too complicated for even experts to predict what will happen all the time.
The uncertainties of the allopathic model, acceptable in medical science, multiply exponentially in the social and spiritual realm. Behavior regarded as aberrant in one setting might be considered quite normal elsewhere. It would be difficult, if not impossible, except in the most obvious cases, to agree on the definition of a disease or its symptoms. To then prescribe a treatment for a social disorder, based upon the accumulated experience of prior researchers in the field, runs into a host of difficulties, not the least of which would be in agreeing upon a definition of social health. The attempt to scientifically reduce the human psyche to a complex set of conditioned responses, known as behaviorism, was abandoned decades ago as an impossible undertaking. To employ a cause and effect form of reasoning to the behavior of the murderers at Columbine High School is to engage in the same fruitless and counterproductive activities that the behaviorists did in the fifties and sixties.
It is foolish to look for rational reasons for the killings. None of the killings had any ulterior objective beyond a warped personal satisfaction. Attempts to find causes puts us on the path to far deeper and darker places in the human psyche than the average newspaper columnist is willing, or would be allowed, to explore. The origin of the killings lie in the realm of the psyche, or soul. It deals with the images presented by dreams, myths and metaphors.
Speaking mythologically of the killings, we can say that primeval monsters, usually imprisoned in the underworld, have broken out. Perhaps they have even been invited. How did they break out? Who invited them and how was the invitation delivered? Perhaps most importantly, why did the psyche, or soul, require the release of these creatures? Psychologist James Hillman holds that the soul is more than the individual person, and that a school or city or even the world can be said to have a soul. Considering Columbine High School, what movement of soul brought about the catastrophe?
These are the deep questions we must ponder. Since I have asked these questions from a mythological viewpoint, it is reasonable to explore them in the same manner and even to answer them mythically. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, states that one should use only that degree of precision that is appropriate to the subject matter. We might just as easily state that one should use only those metaphors appropriate to the subject. For that reason, although the psychological condition of the killers might have been relevant, or instructive, or even useful, in preventing the killings, it would not be of any use to us in ascertaining why these things happened when and where they did.
Explanations should be made of more universal stuff.
It seems to me that the archetype evoked by this series of killings is the Greek god Kronos. In the beginning, according to Hesiod's Theogony, there was only Chaos, Darkness and Eros. Chaos and Darkness mated to produce Gaia, the earth goddess, and Ouranos, the sky god, who in turn mated. Ouranos, fearing that one of his offspring would overcome him, buried his children in the earth, the womb of Gaia, an act that greatly grieved their mother. She made a large, iron sickle and asked her children for assistance in defeating Ouranos. All refused but the youngest, Kronos. One evening, when Ouranos descended upon Gaia, Kronos seized him and, using the sickle given him by Gaia, cut off his genitals and threw them in the ocean, thus liberating himself and his brothers and sisters from their captivity and making himself the king of the gods.
Ouranos, in his anger, predicted that Kronos would in turn be overthrown by one of his own children. Kronos mated with his sister Rhea, but to forestall his own overthrow by one of his offspring, Kronos swallowed his children as they were born. Rhea, with the assistance of her mother, Gaia, devised a scheme to hide her son Zeus in the earth and to give Kronos instead a rock covered in a baby's blanket. Kronos, described by Hesiod as stupid, fell for the subterfuge and swallowed the rock. Zeus ultimately defeated Kronos and forced him to disgorge the children he had swallowed.
George Büchner, in Danton's Death, was the first author to observe that revolutions, like Saturn (Kronos's Roman counterpart), devour their children. But revolutions evoke Kronos in many other ways. Kronos violently rebelled against his father's oppression by wounding him to the extent that Ouranos never again descended upon Gaia, but forever remained aloof.
Revolutions nearly always claim to seek justice, but in triumph they seldom actually establish justice. Like Kronos, revolutions are reactions to oppression and inflicted suffering. Often, the revolutionary merely wishes to replace his tormentor and assume the same role. The story of Ouranos and Kronos are not about justice and injustice because they themselves have no sense of justice. They are moved by the needs for survival, reproduction, and power. Their motivations are reptilian, not human. It is not until the advent of Zeus that justice of a sort becomes established by Zeus's deliberate assignment of each god to a residence and a role in the grand scheme of things.
I used the term "reptilian" deliberately, because the proto-gods appear to be related to that portion of the human brain that precedes conscious thought: the brain stem and the limbic area. Hunger, sexual motivation, fear, anger, and the passions in general center around the "old" brain, the brain we inherited from our reptilian ancestors.
The reptilian brain is not a reasonable brain. It knows only desire, survival and power. Hesiod appropriately locates these proto-gods in Tartarus, the deepest region of the Earth, even below the realm of Hades. The inhabitants of Tartarus evoke the archetypes of the dark, buried, animal emotions that are normally kept from human consciousness and direct control by the "Zeussian" faculty. Simply because they are imprisoned in the unconscious does not mean, however, that they are not alive and active. As a matter of fact, they are the very creatures that give substance to life, that make it worth living. It is the Titans, as archetypes, that supply our loves, our fears, our hungers, our aversions. It is impossible for me to explain just why I like broccoli and equally impossible for someone else to explain why she dislikes it. We simply do or do not. Similarly, I cannot explain why I am attracted to certain members of the opposite sex and not to others equally alluring, or they to me. We do not arrive at these likes and dislikes through a process of reason. The come from places we seldom, if ever, visit.
On the dark side, an alcoholic, knowing full well that his addiction to drink is destroying him, continues to drink self-destructively, but without the slightest idea of the real origin of his compulsion. Likewise, an angry person is not a logical person--the anger wells up from subterranean springs, their source a mystery. Justification for these emotions comes after the emotion subsides, when the Zeussian brain takes over and tries to repair the damage.
Reports of the school killings are replete with references to the intense anger and rage of the killers. Anger and rage dwell in Tartarus. The Greeks peopled Tartarus not only with Titans defeated by Zeus but also with hideous-looking, murderous monsters who could not be trusted to associate with either humans or gods. Senseless murders, motivated by rage at fellow students as well as the world in general, evoke these hideous-looking, murderous archetypes who have taken over, at least for a while, the kingship of the interior universe of the killers.
In order to go forward with this archetypal inquiry, we must trace a little further the history of the gods. When Zeus defeated Kronos he cast him, along with his supporters among the Titans, into Tartarus, the door of which was guarded by the Cyclopes, huge godlike creatures with one eye. According to Hesiod, "Tartarus is fenced with bronze and around its gullet / drifts night in triple array, while above it grow / the roots of the earth and of the barren sea." The three Cyclopes were imprisoned by Ouranos but liberated by Zeus upon the advice of Gaia. In return, they gave him the thunderbolts he used to defeat Kronos. Zeus, in other words, found it necessary to acquire primeval "reptilian" energy to defeat Kronos and to maintain his power.
Zeus established law and order. Instead of burying his potential rivals or swallowing them whole, control techniques which had already been shown ineffective, Zeus assigned each god a place on Mount Olympus and a role to play in the grand scheme of the universe. He even found a place for his son, Aries, the god of war, whom he loathed. He thus satisfied the gods with their stations, and when they occasionally transgressed Zeus's decrees, he could easily bring them in line.
The ancient Greeks believed in honoring all the gods. Every temple dedicated to an individual deity also contained statutes of the remaining pantheon, a reflection of the classical balance so dear to Attic sensibility. The idea of each god being assigned to its proper station recurs in Plato's vision of the ideal republic, where each part of the polis, like each corresponding part of the soul, is assigned to its proper role and station.
The orderly, classical vision, with everything in is proper place, stands totally opposed to our contemporary conception of the individual and society. Indeed, it was at odds with much of the ancient Greek social and political reality, much like our Christian vision is deeply at odds with our contemporary society.
When Olympus is neglected or in disarray, the Titans below will almost certainly begin to emerge. They are not reasonable or logical; in fact, like Kronos, they are stupid. But they are immensely powerful and capable of doing great deeds, both good and bad, but always disruptive and scary. They are barbaric.
I think the psyche, or soul, of Columbine is likewise is in disarray. But that is not the fault of its students, its teachers or its administrators. Finding fault is a waste of time and only obscures our metaphorical vision. The soul of Columbine, like the souls of people, extends far beyond its walls to its community, to the entire nation, indeed to the entire world. The disarray in Columbine is no more or less than a reflection of the disarray in the world around it. That is why it is not inappropriate to connect the mindless, irrational war our nation is presently waging against the people of Serbia with the mindless, irrational shooting of innocent students at Columbine. The titanic forces of power and revenge have been unleashed in both cases and they are indeed mindless and irrational. They are not connected with our more refined and intellectual ideas about justice, because they originate in places that we inherited from the reptiles. Justification, which is really rationalization, comes after the fact. The killings in the schools were an act of rebellion, of liberation, just as Kronos violently rebelled against an intolerable oppression. But the rebellion, like Kronos, consumed its children with horrifying haste.
The remedy is metaphorically to arrange the higher faculties of the psyche much as Zeus ordered the myriad deities on Mount Olympus. It is easy with our penchant for literal-mindedness to interpret the myth as calling for a deeply authoritarian government, with an all-powerful ruler who maintains order by his superior power. Dictatorial government was attempted by both Ouranos and Kronos, however, and both were self-defeating.
In contrast, Zeus seldom intervened in the affairs of the individual gods. Each had his abode and realm. If we can grasp one interpretation of the Olympian pantheon as the metaphor for our own psyche it should be obvious that a well-ordered, "just" psyche is one in which each element is given its rightful place and appropriately honored. On Mount Olympus, no god, not even Zeus himself, considered himself so important as to exclude any other god from her rightful position. No god was to be slighted.
It is beyond the scope of this article to delve deeply into the stories and the significance of individual gods. Readers interested in these matters are referred to the works of C. J. Jung, James Hillman and Thomas Moore, among many others. On the other hand, it is entirely appropriate to point out the broad outlines of our contemporary Olympian devotion.
We have constructed large temples to the war god (Aries/Mars), the god of technology (Hephaestos/Vulcan) and the god of intellectual analysis (Apollo). We have neglected the altars of love (Aphrodite/Venus), spiritual depth and ecstasy (Dionysos/Baccus) and the arts (The Olympian Muses - Kleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Ploymnia, Ourania and Kalliope). In our obsession with money and wealth, we have brought ourselves into a particularly close relationship with the terrible god of wealth, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead (Hades/Pluto).
As in the stories from mythology, gods and goddesses that are neglected do not simply go away; they often visit retribution upon the impious, usually in a way that reflects the nature of the god. Each of these gods has a nasty side. Dionysos ignored returns as addiction, fanaticism and religious cultism. Aphrodite ignored returns as sexual perversion, repression, and pornography. These are metaphors for the unbalanced soul. And a soul in disarray, as we have already seen, is an engraved invitation to the reptilian creatures from the depths to emerge from their private abode and take control of our lives.
5/13/99
------------------
Copyright 1999, Thomas Lowe. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.