The Negative Side of Senex
Dec. 7th, 2022 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Scene from the film American Beauty
The opposite of one thing is almost invariably another equally bad thing. Nowhere is this better demonstrated in the opposite of Puer Aeternus, whose opposite is Senex.
Puer Aeternus as a god is symbolized by Dionysus and Mercury/Hermes in equal measure. He knows how to party, can be prone to debauchery, and suffers an airy detachment because of his cherished collection of unattainable ideals. Where Puer is dependent and childlike long after his actual childhood, Senex is all work and no play except for a few brief moments near cradle-time and near decrepit old age. Senex is ruled by Saturn, Lord of Time, and when imbalanced, he casts a warped reflection as a child who is old before his or her time, stodginess, conformity, and compliance.
The C Word
Much to my disappointment, almost every vegan I used to pal around with ended up getting the MRNA quaxxine and its multiple boosters. I have meditated many times on the Compliant, and from what I can tell, there is a direct correlation between compliance and a desire for material comfort, status, and unearned wealth. Enter the MRNA quaxxine mandates: those vegans of supposed moral fiber did not stand a chance. Give up travel by plane because it was either take the quax or forgo the overseas trip? Not them. Skip a chance to virtue signal about being quaxxed despite mounting evidence of its dangers, plus busloads of dead athletes dropping dead on the field every day? Nah. There is absolutely zero reason for a so-called vegan to get an injection that was dreamed up and pushed HARD by the same people who tortured beagles in labs by sticking their heads in boxes so their heads could be eaten by sandflies. Though mainstream media has done their level best to disown #beaglegate by fact checking it into Google oblivion, as they say on the X-Files, the truth is out there.
Puer Aeternus clings to his ideals with recklessness and would sacrifice all of his potentials for human connection, love, and loyalty on the altar of adventure and free-wheeling excitement. Senex is the opposite. Senex throws ideals under the bus, happily forgetting them as they are ground into a pulp between rubber and iron. Senex extremists cling to the notion they are the Good People and Family Men (and Women) but they only love what they can control. Senex is more than happy to hoard and it is the mark of the Senex to amass far more than what is needed or even wanted. If we are judging on deeds and not words, Senex does not do any good deed without making a minor spectacle of it. If Senex gives to charity, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be tax-deductible and the money will flow back to him in a cycle of grift, such as the money that was supposedly donated to Ukraine war efforts and got funneled into Democratic election funds in 2022.
The egregore of Senex personified is Karen. Now, all of you who are named Karen who are outraged at the use of this name to denote a tacky, “I need to speak to your manager”, middle aged, designer leggings-wearing harpy should take a moment to consider the plight of men named Richard. Many of the vegans I used to know were Karens about food. They would go into restaurants and get mad if the restaurant did not have vegan options, or worse, they would get mad if the restaurant did not have oil and gluten free vegan food. Sure, they could have stayed home and eaten their dry baked potato (with no salt of course) and a chopped apple, but that would be too easy. Instead, one of the vegans who came to the restaurant meet ups I used to host argued for a good fifteen minutes with an underpaid counter worker how the cook should prepare her falafel without oil. If said vegan had ever bothered with the tiniest bit of self-reflection, she would have understood that she was power tripping. That is Karen’s game, which I will discuss in a future essay about toxic femininity. Karen does not care about the pittance she receives from returning her craft supplies at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, she does not care about the oil in a falafel, and she does not actually want her child to get an undeserved A in Reading Comprehension. What Karen wants is power, and she gets it by feeding off the negative emotional reactions of the people she treats as underlings.
Senex the Witch
Senex wants to be King (or Queen in the case of Karen). Whereas Puer wishes to be free of domination, Senex wants to dominate and control, preferably forever. Puer has plenty of negative traits, but at least he does not need to be worshipped. Senex does, and her black tar of ill-will is directed at all who do not worship her. Because Senex is a cheerless scold, she hates seeing other people having more fun than she perceives herself as having. Instead of turning inward and working on herself, she thrusts her ill-will at them in the form of jealousy, bitterness, and self-righteous anger. Truth be told, Senex is an emotional vampire who gets off on stifling the free will and humor of others: misery loves company and she is hell bent and determined to suck the universe into her blackened womb. Perhaps you can tell I am more than passingly familiar with the Senex archetype. Perhaps this is because I personally hosted it for longer than I would like to admit.
Senex wants to win the game of life — who knew it was a contest? In order to be a Queen, she has to emulate Queens, and that means acting in accordance with royal dictates. Senex forms her Queendom with the accoutrements of conformity: a family made up of parents and children, an owned house or condo in the best part of town, and a tribe around her of other compliant conformists. She prefers orderliness and she will have it at all costs, including the shunning of any Puers who dare defy her or the government/corporations/TV she takes marching orders from. She believes in Law, and because at her core she believes that she is the Law, she will carefully overlook minor things such as other people’s basic rights in order to maintain her unelected holy rule.
Male Senexes
Saturn himself being male means there are plenty of male Senexes. In the 1999 film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey plays a suburban father of a teenaged girl who is in love with the boy next door. The boy next door has a domineering, control freak father who was an Army colonel and served in Vietnam. Col. Frank Fitts beats his wife and son regularly. His fixation with perceived order manifests as a virulent hatred of homosexuality and Nazi memorabilia in his private home office. In my own novel, River’s Heart, a male Senex named Nathan Yardie hosts weekly church services in his private suburban McMansion because the local church expelled him for his extremist views. Hosting his own also gives Nathan the control he desires and enables him to feel that he has power over others. In both stories, Senex’s lust for control ends in tragedy.
When I was a kid, I had the misfortune to have spent time with contemporaries who were growing up in homes ruled by a Senex extremist father. The home ruled by a Senex is a terrifying place. Though it may appear orderly and disciplined, with its beds made the moment they are exited in the morning and its meals served on-time by an obedient Senex wife, on the astral plane it is jibber-jabbering chaos. Senex-ruled homes are foul and teeming with bad feelings, repressed emotions, and parasitic entities who feed on the energy flows of psychic discord. Senex homes are essentially broken no matter how “together” they appear on the outside. Narcissistic Senex’s hatred for those who do not ask “How high?” when he tells them to jump spills over the most onto his family, and unless they are already earthly saints, his family can only react by secretly hating him back.
To be a Senex of either male or female variety is to suppress and squelch the Puer instinct, even when that instinct would lead to spiritual development, emotional maturity, and happiness. Though the Senex is mature when it comes to making a living and following orders, he or she is a vulnerable baby of unexamined urges on the inside. Puer, having rejected the automaton Get a Job/ Make Money/ Buy a House cycle, at least knows and respects himself to invoke fearlessness when it comes to a little risk. Puer runs away from responsibility on the material plane but does own himself more than Senex does, because Senex seeks control over others instead of owning his fear of not being in control of himself.
Just like Puer, Senex’s choice to get out of the monkey trap starts with Number One. Senex has the double burden of being a compliant little robot and wanting to be Ruler of the Known Universe. Since Senex loves routine, of course I will suggest that anyone who takes umbrage at their resemblance to this article gets into a routine of daily, relentless discursive meditation. Harnessing the power of Type A diligence when it comes to discursive meditation is likely to have amazing results. I know it did in my case. My autistic tendency to maintain daily routines come hell or high water has translated into performing the Sphere of Protection and discursive meditation every day for the last seven years except for the day I rescued my aunt’s cats in 2019. Like an elephant, I never forget to do Ogham readings every week, except of course that one time I completely forgot and then read on Monday instead of Sunday LOL.
In yet another future essay, I will be discussing the history of Christmas and its relationship to Saturnalia. If Senex wants to be free, he or she needs to manifest the benevolent side of Saturn, also known as Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol or modern day Santa Claus. When Senex loosens his/her wallet deathgrip and sends the stopped flow of hoarded resources of money, warmth, and mirth into the community, the result is a healed and balanced Senex who has all of the good aspects of reliability and stability with a dash of healthy, balanced Puer. Just like a healed, balanced Puer, Senex too can turn a state of stagnation and retardation into a springboard for growth and true contentment.
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