The Negative Side of Puer Aeternus

 

 

Millions, if not tens of millions, are currently looking down the barrel of unemployment and/or underemployment as various forces crumble the already brittle economy. Anyone who follows my weekly Ogham divinations can depend on any number of people worried about losing their job, wanting to jump out of a dead end job, or inquiring about what gainful employment looks like once they are no longer employed at their current job. In my own case, the overreaction to Covid and the subsequent quaxxine mania resulted in the closure of my commercial space. I owned and operated a private lesson studio in the Midwest that offered group lessons via the local park district and an array of recording services at one point. All of the work my husband and I did to begin and maintain the place over a span of 13 years was dashed on the rocks of MRNA-quaxxine and mask hysteria. With the help of andrewskeen  horary astrology divinations as well as my own Ogham divinations, I was narrowly able to jump the sinking ship and set up shop teaching from home. There are plenty of people whom Coviditarianism has put into a far worse position. Anyone with children or grandchildren depending upon them should be terrified right now. Anyone with money tied up in stocks, IRAs, crypto, or treasury bonds should understand that money could vaporize overnight as if it was never there. Anyone whose health is not robust or who has loved ones with dire medical conditions should prepare for the slog of hard times and potentially early death because hospitalization has become a death sentence and most medical professionals are complete quacks. This is not an easy time to be alive and it is an even harder time in which to cultivate gratitude, though (like a broken record) once again I will insist that gratitude may be the only way out of the trap we all find ourselves in.

 

This is a time of egregores, that is to say those spirits that are formed from massive archetypes, gone toxic. One of the most corrupted and stale egregores around is the Puer Aeternus.

 

The Puer Aeternus or Eternal Child has become one of the most commonly manifested archetypes in modern life. I believe the eternal man-child is more pervasively present than almost any other time in history. The reason there are so many aging Peter Pans and their irresponsible, non-Wendy like female counterparts is the continued dominance of cheaply-available petroleum. One to three hundred years from now, when powering a vehicle at 50-plus miles per hour is a much more expensive and rare event, Puer Aeternis and Puella Aeterna will be as scarce as honest politicians.

 

What and Who is Puer Aeternus?

 

Puer Aeternus comes in many shapes, sexes, sizes, and ages. The term “Puer Aeternus” was originally coined by Ovid in his Metamorphoses to describe the child god Iacchus. Psychiatrist/psychologist Carl Jung later adapted the term to demonstrate the deep reasons why some people refuse to grow up, and how that can be both good and bad.

 

I am familiar with the Puer Aeternus archetype because to some degree I have lived it and continue to live it. Though I am financially stable for the moment, this has not always been the case. I am a musician, and that means I am acquainted with bohemian struggle.

 

Puer Aeternus as manifested in human beings is not all bad. My inner Peter Pan has kept me from making several horrible choices that would have led to my consummate misery. For instance, my youthful stubbornness kept me from certain mates who made me feel I was trapped inside a living hell. I briefly considered going back to school so I could enter a career as an elementary schoolteacher. Had I gone down that road, I would have had a benefits package and a retirement plan, but I also would have been saddled with massive debt and mandatory MRNA injections if I wanted to keep my job in 2021. I also considered literally learning to code so I could go into web development. This too would have meant schooling, debt, and a high likelihood of someone trying to stick me with multiple syringes in order to remain employed. Thanks to Puer Aeternus, my marriage was founded on love, not love of money. My weird job, one that I created myself for fear of being trapped in an office job, healed many wounds in my soul.

 

Like anything in this world, Puer Aeternus has extremes that are inherently bad and balanced in the middle. Puer Aeternus’s polar opposite is Senex (Latin for “old man”). Puer is obsessed with airy fantasies and Senex is obsessed with hard realities. Puer tries to dwell entirely in a self-made heaven and Senex insists on grinding away on Earth. Puer is pure play and Senex is all work all the time. In a future essay, I will discuss what happens when we fall into Senex imbalance. Puer imbalance is the main danger I will be discussing today, and it is a common reaction when one's livelihood is being dangled in front of or has already been devoured by economic alligators.

 

Though the phenomenon of Puer Aeternus becomes more common in decadent civilizations like our own, Puer has always been around, arguably long before Ovid coined the term. Puers in the negative sense become trapped by their own inner fantasy lives.

 

Very often you find in the puer such a rich fantasy life, but that wealth of fantasy is dammed back and cannot flow into life because the puer refuses to accept reality as it is. He dams up his inner life. In actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies. In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the inner riches are wasted. They cannot get into something meaningful but slowly overgrow the real personality so that the individual walks about in a cloud of fantasies, fantasies which in themselves are interesting and full of rich possibilities, full of unlived life. You feel that such a person has a tremendous wealth and capacity but there is no possibility of finding a means of realization, and then the tree—the inner wealth— becomes negative, and in the end kills the personality." -Marie-Louise Von Franz, psychologist and student of Carl Jung

 

They Invented Slacking

 

I have known several slacker Puers, some female but most male. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, many of my upper middle class suburban male peers engaged in video game and cartoon marathons for weeks at a time. One in particular got fired from several fast food establishments for stealing from the registers (he was as white as a funeral lily, by the way) and spent an epic number of months wallowing in my ex-boyfriend's mom's basement. While one of my brothers was in the Marines and the other was off at college, various sons of architects in my neighborhood frittered away their useable brains on soft and hard drugs. Nowadays, the modern equivalents of these Puers chat about how much they resent Chad between yelling at their mothers to serve them more tendies.

 

Slacker Puers are nothing new. Prohibition itself was mostly an effort by and for women that went along with women's suffrage and the burgeoning movement of vegetarianism in the 19th and early 20th century. All three social justice movements were aspects of the battle against the male Puer Aeternus's dominant power that included his ability to wreck the life of any woman unfortunate enough to be proxy to his self-destruction. The original slacker Puer was the alcoholic father who chose destitution in his urge to escape the responsibilities of providing food and shelter for his family. Women who could vote and own property had a better shot at putting food in their children's mouths than the traditional model where the man made all the decisions and his wife did not have the right to go elsewhere. Vegetarianism was an attempt of women to assert their own dominance via the daily ritual of the table: clean eating and the avoidance of eating animal flesh was originally a women's movement.

 

Prohibition of animal flesh and secretions represents a form of Senex schooling the Puer Aeternus and showing him who is boss where daily bread is concerned. On other fronts, prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s was an attempt to take away another of Puer's vices and to force him into a mantle of responsibility.

 

In his memoir Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt describes his post-Great Depression childhood:

Dad is out looking for a job again and sometimes he comes home with the smell of whiskey, singing all the songs about suffering Ireland. Mam gets angry and says Ireland can kiss her arse. He says that's nice language to be using in front of the children and she says never mind the language, food on the table is what she wants, not suffering Ireland. She says it was a sad day Prohibition ended because Dad gets the drink going around to saloons offering to sweep out the bars and lift barrels for a whiskey or a beer. Sometimes he brings home bits of the free lunch, rye bread, corned beef, pickles. He puts the food on the table and drinks tea himself. He says food is a shock to the system and he doesn't know where we get our appetites. Mam says, They get their appetites because they're starving half the time. -Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

The above examples are Puer when he runs off the rails. Make no mistake that the feminine version is just as bad. One female Puer I know is currently homeless at age 57 because she still would rather get dressed up and go out clubbing (as ridiculous as that sounds) than settle down and get a job. She was literally given a free house by someone in her family in her 20s, which she promptly squandered. Another aging Puella has been married at least a dozen times and finds her prospects dwindling as she continues to squander money and complains bitterly about her current husband. Puellas of means turn to plastic surgery in botched, grotesque pursuit of turning back the clock. The results end up eerily displayed on their faces: tight, doll-like, and perpetually surprised.

 

There is only one person who can shepherd the Puer into a balanced mode of taking care of himself and not vampirizing the emotions, money, and wealth of others. That person is Puer himself. Without his cooperation, Puer stays Puer, living in his little bubble of narcissistic creative anachronism. His bubble is not isolated enough, for it bounces around wrecking what it touches.

 

If a Puer wants to get out of the bubble, the way out is surprisingly easy. Marie Louise Von Franz has already beat us to the punch. To escape the artificial escape/trap of Puerism, the Puer must get to work. Puers hate the workaday world, and their reluctance to put up with employment may be a lifesaving attitude at times.  I hated working in offices so much in 2006, I created my own career as music teacher. Nevertheless, those who are "too good" to put up with group work for any amount of time and simultaneously unwilling or unable to exploit their own talents enough to contribute to their own needs for food and shelter can still contribute, and it is this contribution that not only frees them from their prison of immaturity, but it also opens the doors of opportunity for gainful self-employment later on.  

 

We all suffer depression at times, and anyone who hates their job or is recently jobless will likely be tempted to sink into a state of dependence as they are increasingly handicapped by circumstance.  Puers claim to hate manufactured helplessness, but nobody is more immersed in manufactured helplessness than Puer.  Refusing manufactured helplessness, including self-manufactured helplessness, is the key to avoiding the Puer trap.  Having lost my ability to rent or own a home multiple times and moving back to my parents' house several times, once in my early 40s, was humiliating, but it was also an education as well as a cherished time of my life. I could have become a Puella, loafing and lounging and allowing my elderly parents to take care of me in every way. There was no way in hell I would do that. Instead, I cooked and cleaned every day. I swallowed my pride and made myself valuable. Any Puer or Puella can do the same thing: if you are good at cooking and cleaning, walk away from the computer right now, put the gaming controller away, and go clean the bathroom instead of leaving it for your spouse, parent, or roommate. Do something that costs zero money and is not a scheme for the easily suckered but will benefit everyone you live with. In other words, refuse to become a negative, dependent Puer with every fiber of your being and you'll be free soon enough. Get up a half hour earlier and do something, even if you are tired and under the weather. Activities like cleaning the bathroom, doing the dishes, helping the children with their homework, or figuring out how to build a solar oven may not seem like much, but everyone has got to start somewhere and every little bit helps. Small acts of work add up. They are a form of gratitude and a physical way of demonstrating how much you appreciate those who support you and enable you to live. The detachment of Puer is rooted in ungratefulness -- the Puer wants to run away at all times, to give away whatever wealth he was gifted with, and escape to a more meaningful world. I am here to say that the meaningful world is right here and right now, and you can start exactly where you are and find it.