kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with archetypes

Men and women on the political right delight in taking stabs at the low-hanging fruit of the childless cat lady stereotype. According to the narrative, cats are put in place as pathetic substitutes for human children. The ownership of cats is a reverse status symbol: it is a signifier of a woman as bitter and envious of "real" parents of human children. It is always pointed out, often multiple times, that the cat lady will die alone and that her ignomious demise will be proof that she wasted her life on things that did not matter.

I find the cat lady stereotype to be a transparently hysterical projection of the fears of parents. Like many hysterical fears, it hides the terrifying truth under a caul of mockery. First of all, not every cat person fits the single, childless stereotype. Plenty of women who have become mothers are also cat ladies. Cat Dads are also very much a thing: cat expert Jackson Galaxy (not his real name) is one of the primary influences who educated me on cat behavior. I have not met the guy -- he managed to do this solely via TV and internet.

Second of all, when we shoot straight to the heart of the cat lady stereotype, having biological children offers zero guarantees you won't die as alone as the craziest of cat ladies. Most of the old people languishing in nursing homes right now -- literally begging to go to a home that no longer exists -- have at least one child. More often than not, it is the child that put them in the nursing home to begin with. Dying alone these days is more of a function of class than parental status. Basically if your adult children dwell within the PMC or Professional Managerial Class (or if they want to be there) it is highly likely you will die alone. Their PMC aspirations will be nearly directly proportional to how much physical and emotional distance they put between themselves and you. Consider Asian immigrants who confine their experience with their elderly parents in India, the Philippines, etc. to whatever return visits the work visa and budget will barely allow. They don't come to the US to live like white trash.

The Age of Isolated Hyperdependence

There has never been a better or a worse time to raise a child than the current era. On the upside, childbirth is somewhat easier than it used to be because of sanitation, surgery, and drugs. Very few in the industrialized world are starving in any way except etheric starvation. On the downside, we live in a culture of isolated hyperdependence where the child is the most isolated and hyperdependent of all. In ancient Greece, when a couple had a child they could not afford or did not want, they left the baby in the public square. If the baby was not adopted, he or she was left to die. Cultures around the globe did the same thing: abortion and infanticide is nothing new. In almost every ancient culture, boys were apprenticed and trained as warriors shortly after puberty. Girls were married off around the same age. In the supposedly-enlightened Victorian era, children were routinely exploited as laborers, hence the various portraits of child labor in Charles Dickens novels. The molly-coddled TV/iPad/console childhood is a blip on the radar of world history. It will be shortlived.

Preventing a child of today from being at least partially raised by screens is virtually impossible. Adults who were raised on screens now raise children on screens who will raise their children with copious screens.

The Eternal Child

Humans remain in an infantile state far longer than other mammals because of our large brains. In almost every species of the mammalian kingdom outside our own, adulthood happens within a single year of being born. Adding fuel to the fire, modernity has enabled us to extend infancy from cradle to grave. Being able to extend the life of someone born with compromised lungs, compromised guts, or a compromised brain is a double-edged sword. If the disabled, autistic, and mentally retarded can live into their 70s, which nowadays they can, the logical result is a large population of adult orphans who have no way of making a living or working together outside of gaming chats. I may be lampooned for my cats but at least I will not leave an adult human child behind to deal with the collapse of the only world she has ever known.

The burden of responsibility that goes with being a human mother can and does drive women crazy. Nobody is more psychotic than the regretful mother, and all mothers have regrets at some point. As selfless as the mother's journey often turns out, the choice to have a child is just that: a choice. It is a choice that usually began with the statement "I wanted..." Yet maybe she didn't get what she thought she wanted.

I did not have the biological urge to become a mother. To my mind, it really needs to be there for a woman to become a good mother, regardless of whether she conceives or adopts. Without the overwhelming urge to become a mom, the species would quickly end. All a man has to do is shoot his rocks off; women have to be there no matter what, and if they aren't, all hell breaks loose. The fatherly version of toxic is either to be a controlling dictator or to up and leave. The motherly version of toxic is much more insidious and complicated.

Types of Devouring Mother

Carl Jung meaningfully plumbed the devouring mother archetype, expounding the concept beyond Freud's Oedipal fixations. The devouring mother is a narcissist who uses her child as a second self or mini-me. As I briefly explained in this essay, I believe that mother and child share the etheric body until the child is approximately seven years old and the processes of puberty begin to differentiate and develop their default etherically-male bodies. Girls separate from their mothers as they go through puberty because they begin to polarize with boys and are drawn away from the maternal force by the magnetic etheric presence of young men. Boys separate because their etheric bodies invert polarity as they become physically male and etherically female. Nevertheless, until young childhood wanes, it is this shared male etheric body that gives the mother the ability to devour the child, as to some degree it is an act of metaphorical cannibalism because they co-habitate a slowly-separating subtle body.

MINOS: Married in Name Only

The MINO is a common type of devouring mother. She hates men and she hates her man. Though she may have occasional outbursts of affection, she's mostly in it out of the grudging acknowledgement her kids are better off with their dad in the picture and/or for the money. Like many women, she tends to externalize blame, using men and masculinity as her scapegoat. A MINO will often openly lust after men in the community or celebrities. No attractive male piece of eye candy is off-limits to the MINO: she will go after a neighbor, the mailman, or her teenage daughter's boyfriend. She spends her time re-living her halycon days and has no sane way of accepting the ageing process. She is also known as a cougar or MILF and usually ends up divorced.

Boss Mom

Boss mom's kids are mere accessories to her busy life. They are exploited, not heard. She will endanger their health and well-being without a second thought if it improves her public image or bottom line. Famous examples of Boss Moms include Kris Jenner, Yolanda Hadid, and Gywneth Paltrow. The children of a boss mom are unfortunate mini-mes who end up pitted against each other. Boss mom's children are only there to extend her own beloved image. Boss Mom is the most hands-off and absentee of mothers. She relegates childrearing duties to other women whenever possible. Her career is always far more important than her child's needs.

Karen

The Karen is a control freak, Type A, borderline personality who seeks to control others via shame. Her shame, of course, is a projection of her own shadow. Karens are frightened of people who see beneath their facade of having it all handled and together. The Karen exists in a dual reality of wanting to be pitied and wanting to wield infinite power. At the root of the Karen, there is a festering ball of shame and regret for the avalanche of bad decisions and behavior that started as a single snowball. She knows at any opportunity that she could have stopped herself from acting like a Karen but pretends that circumstances put a gun to her head. She knows this to be a lie. Karens usually have children because they want the clout and virtue signaling that goes along with being a mother in our civilization.

Smother Mother

Smother Mothering is a disorder on the same spectrum as Munchausen's by proxy, which is when a parent, usually the mother, deliberately poisons and sickens her child in order to run him or her around to various doctors for treatments. The mother actually has no concern for the child (otherwise she would not deliberately sicken him) and uses the child's body in order to get attention. The masquerade is that she loves the child to pieces, and in her demented way, she does love the child. She also hates the child.

The Smother Mother spoils and molly-coddles her children until they have no will of their own with which to provide for themselves or anyone else. The child becomes a perpetual baby ensnared by the mother's pathological need to be worshipped. Discipline is something that is supposed to magically appear and happen on its own. She is always bargaining and pleading with the child to enforce limits on himself or herself. This bargaining usually happens in public for the "benefit" of onlookers. The child becomes used to throwing tantrums, hitting, and screaming in order to obtain a toy or a trinket. She uses the extreme displays of her child's manufactured problems in order to feed her martyrdom complex and sense of helplessness. She frequently abdicates matters of discipline because a calm and ordered existence does not generate the dramatic energy she subsists upon like a vampire. The child is an extension of herself and she hates herself. She handicaps the child while putting him or her on a pedestal for attention and clout.

In all of these cases, we see women with boundary issues. They don't know where the child ends and self begins. They lack the willpower to understand what they are projecting or how to stop it. I was lucky; I grew up with a good mother. I know how rare a good mother happens to be. I was not willing to be a bad mother and that is why I decided to skip it this time around. This does not mean I would be a bad mother -- we will never know -- and it certainly does not preclude me from expressing my maternal instincts. I don't confine my maternal expressions to cats by the way, and neither do my fellow childless cat ladies. There are a million ways to be maternal without being the literal mother of a human being or even a woman. The Great Mother is accessible to all of us and lives within all of us. That is why she is called "great".

As a privileged, upper-middle class child, I was taken to see the Nutcracker ballet more than once. The Nutcracker ballet is one of those annual bits of culture that aptly represents the frenzy of the holidays: when you are caught in a materialist web as I was, it becomes more about dressing up and going into the city than the actual music or performance. I did not appreciate the magnificence of a live orchestra playing Tchaikovsky back then, despite him being (IMO) the most underrated composer in all of Western music. The music of the Nutcracker is transcendent in that it reaches across gulfs of time, space, and circumstance to evoke both the era from whence it came as well as unique, divinely-inspired genius. If you've ever been lucky enough to witness live music played by the best of professional musicians, you know that it is a mind-blowing experience. There is no comparison between hearing a recording and being in the same room as an orchestra or band. The effect of the live music experience is electrifying and addictive. I personally became so addicted to listening to live music in the perfect acoustic environment of the Auditorium Theater, I did a stint as an usher in college. I wonder if Andy Frain is still only paying their employees seven dollars an hour? I am going to bet it is still in the same ballpark.

Despite being treated to the live music and ballet Nutcracker as a child, one of the first truly inspiring experiences I had with Tchaikovsky's score was not at the ballet but parked in front of a Betamax tape-recording of a 1973 animation from the USSR simply entitled The Nutcracker. Maybe my limited attention span had something to do with my enjoyment, but the weird gravity of that little 25 minute cartoon has always stood out in my mind as more magical as the "real" experience of seeing the Nutcracker as a live ballet.

Once Upon a Time in Pre-Revolutionary France

In the original Nutcracker ballet, the story follows Marie, a young, rich girl. Marie's family throws the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties in what seems like end-of-empire France, like right before the bloody beheading phase for royals and their sympathizers. Marie and her brother, Fritz, are the pampered subjects of an extravaganza of gifts and entertainments in the great parlor. At the center of the parlor is the magical Christmas tree. A brief aside -- as a child, the kids down the block had the most amazing birthday parties. Their mom would hire a magician and if it was summer, there was always an ice cream cake, meaning a cake in which ice cream was essentially built in. It was delicious. At any rate, Marie's parents' party put my suburban neighbors' fete to shame. Marie is gifted with a Nutcracker. She falls in love with the toy. Her bratty brother grabs it and starts cracking nuts in its mouth. One nut is so large, it breaks the Nutcracker's jaw. Marie bandages her toy. When the party ends and everyone goes to bed, she sneaks out to see her toy and falls asleep with it under the Christmas tree.

Meanwhile in Czarist Russia...

In the 1973 Russian animation, an unnamed girl protagonist I will call Tatyana is not the daughter of the master of the house. Instead, she is a humble servant who is clearly not invited to partake in the Christmas party at all. Her role at the party is to clean up the messes left behind by the rich people. Nobody notices or cares she exists when she appears late at night with her broom to clean up under the Christmas tree. (If you'll forgive another aside, as a daughter of privilege myself, I can attest that real Christmas trees shed a terrific amount of needles no matter how well they are watered and humidified. My Dad used to insist on getting a real tree from a Christmas tree farm every year throughout my childhood and young adulthood.) Tatyana sweeps those pesky needles and other detritus and her broom becomes enchanted and dances with her. She finds a nutcracker on the floor with a giant nut stuck in its maw, the result of some brutal rich kid who tried to crack a nut, got bored, and threw it on the floor. Tatyana dislodges the nut and kisses the toy. The toy's eyes light up. It has been brought to life by her kiss.

I will let Wikipedia take the wheel from here:

When she kisses him, he comes to life and is devastated when he sees what he has become. It is then and when the Nutcracker decides to tell the girl his story of how he came to be:

A long time ago, there was a party at a royal castle to celebrate the prince's birthday, which was interrupted by the arrival of the three-headed mouse queen and her spoiled brat son, who both behaved very rudely and refused to leave or improve their manners. In exasperation, the king entered a secret chamber to obtain a poison against the mouse queen, but was locked in by the mouse prince. The mouse prince then started harassing the queen and the baby prince, and when the prince hit the mouse prince, its tail got stuck under the cradle and was hurt. In retaliation, the vengeful mouse queen had cursed the baby prince, turning him into a nutcracker, just before she was vanquished by the king. The king and queen were devastated, and the entire hall was petrified while the mouse prince escaped, taking his mother's crown with him. Now the Mouse King, he declared revenge on the Nutcracker. Eventually, the Nutcracker came to be hanged as an ornament on the Christmas tree within this house.

Just after the Nutcracker has finished his story, mice soldiers begin to appear in the hall, followed by the King of Mice. The soldiers try to get the Nutcracker, but the girl stops them, leading the Mouse King to shrink and capture her. The Nutcracker brings the toys around the Christmas tree to life, and a war is fought between the toys and mice. The Nutcracker is captured, bound and about to be whipped to pieces by the Mouse King when the girl throws her wooden clog at him, knocking off and smashing the iron crown, the source of the Mouse King's powers. The Mouse King's magic backfires, making him vanish in a puff of green smoke which also decimates his army the moment they inhale it and start sneezing.

The clog transforms into a glittering shoe. When the Nutcracker takes up the shoe, his shell falls away and he is restored to his human (and now young adult) self. He puts the shoe on the girl's foot, and her maid's uniform is transformed into a princess gown. The two dance to the royal castle to the music of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; the king and queen are brought back to life through the Waltz of the Flowers, and the girl and the prince pass into the realm. All that is left behind of them in the human world are the girl's wooden clogs and the crumbled remains of the Nutcracker's shell lying before the Christmas tree.

Watch on YouTube

In the Nutcracker ballet as well as the original E.T.A. Hoffmann short story it was based upon, the rich, young female protagonist rescues the Nutcracker by bandaging its broken jaw. In the Hoffmann version, a seven-headed mouse king wages war on the Nutcracker and his ornament gang because the nephew of the hired magician/entertainer at the party, Drosselmeyer, once pissed off the Queen of Mice. The backstory in the E.T.A. Hoffmann is frankly quite boring: it's a soap opera and not a compelling one. The King gets mad because the mice have eaten the fat from his royal sausages. He enlists his court mage, Drosselmeyer, to make traps which kill the mice. The Mouse Queen gets (understandably) mad and hexes the King's daughter, Princess Pirlipat, making her into a nutcracker. The desperate king promises Princess Pirlipat in marriage to whoever can break the enchantment. Drosselmeyer's nephew ends up being the one to break the enchantment via a convoluted fairy tale arrangement by which he accidentally kills the mouse queen by stepping on her tail. He breaks the enchantment, but upon becoming her gorgeous self again, she rejects Drosselmeyer's nephew and the nutcracker curse falls upon the young suitor, turning him into a nutcracker toy until Marie finds him. The Mouse Queen's son is the one who takes up his mother's crown and continues to wage war on the Nutcracker.

The Nutcracker ballet skips all of the Mouse backstory and cuts directly to the war, which basically happens for no reason as far as we the audience are concerned. The war goes the same way, with all seeming lost until the girl protagonist hurls her shoe at the last scion of Mouse and kills him. The Nutcracker then whisks Marie off to a magical land where she enjoys even more exotic entertainments from Russia, China, Arabia, etc. in Sugarplum fairyland. Tchaikovsky himself considered the Nutcracker the most boring and worst of his ballets, remarking to a friend in a letter that he thought of it as "infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty."

An Almost-Lost Letter from Tchaikovsky

Yet for a child of the 1980s, the Nutcracker was the only window to the world of Western art music besides Looney Toons and the occasional school trip to the symphony orchestra. I doubt Tchaikovsky knew how very lost the Western art music scene would become, descending into atonalism and the stuntlord, non-musical nonsense of John Cage with his infamous 4'33. He could not have foreseen Autotune, a music-editing software that came from submarine technology that now dominates and curses every song it touches with the buzzsaw sound of bogus proficiency in singing. He had no idea that it would be a sad, grainy cartoon from the former USSR that lifted his own beauty out of obscurity for a depressed eight year old. His music has shaped many a composer's life, including this composer's life. Without him, there would be no Orphic hymns, and even the silly tunes I make up for my cats would be worse for the wear.

Let's get back to the story of the Nutcracker though, shall we? The 1973 animation is a much better story than the byzantine soap opera of the E.T.A Hoffmann or the edited claptrap of the Nutcracker ballet. For one, the protagonist as a poor maidservant instead of the already-rich daughter of decadence makes the animated story several orders more special.

Disney has a Mary Sue Problem

As we speak, Disney is losing millions and millions of dollars with each new release. Disney, for those not in the know, owns the entire Star Wars franchise as well as the Marvel Universe. Not only was Disney's latest animated feature, Wish, a total flop; its most recent disaster, The Marvels, has basically ended any former legitimacy the brand possessed. The trouble with Disney is not just its woke, Bud Lite-ish, creepily-sexualized agenda. Disney no longer tells stories of any substance. Like the Hoffmann and Nutcracker ballet stories, the young, female protagonists have no challenges in their lives. They earn nothing via any sort of hardship, yet we are supposed to love them because they exist. They are Mary Sues. They are Bella Swan in Twilight -- though to Stephenie Meyer's credit, at least she gave Bella a few issues to deal with, including dueling boyfriends and a difficult pregnancy later on. Nobody cares about Mary Sue. She is dull.

Adversity and Meatworld

One of the main reasons Meatworld (my pet name for the physical plane) sucks so hard is that nothing can be built without work. The "magical" computer I type upon was produced by elements probably brought out of the earth by enslaved children in Congo. It was probably put together by Chinese slaves. It was probably sold by some dullard milling away in the Apple store, hoping for a lucky creative break as an influencer or an entertainer. It did not just appear here in front of me because that is not the way Meatworld works.

Every morning, I do about 50-65 jumping jacks, between 30-50 squats, and anywhere between 20-40 military style push ups. I have no desire to do this routine. It leaves me huffing and puffing. At the end of the pushup routine especially, my shoulders and arms threaten to quit a bitch and drop me on my face. Yet if I don't want my belly and hips to grow well beyond their current proportions and if I want all the other benefits such as a mental boost, improved breathing, digestion, I had better jump and plank without fail every morning. When we exercise, we literally rip our muscles, which causes the body's energy to heal them and make them larger. If we don't use it, we lose it. When I am on those last three pushups, I imagine what kind of spaghetti my arms would become without them.

The Mary Sue/Marie Sue of the Nutcracker and other stories doesn't have to suffer pushups, squats, and jumping jacks in order to have buff arms and a flat stomach. In her badly-written fantasy, all she has to do is exist and kinda sorta choose the right thing and she will be blessed with magical riches and a beautiful life.

Compare Grimm's fairytale Mother Hulda, a story about a maltreated young girl who falls down a magical well and lands in the world of the elderly snow queen. The young girl makes the best of her circumstances, working hard and helping Mother Hulda shake her featherbed, which causes it to snow in regular old Meatworld. At the end of her tenure, Mother Hulda gifts her with gold for all her diligent labor and helpful demeanor. The girl returns with her gold. Her jealous, mean mother sends her ugly, fat sister down the same well. The sister also encounters Mother Hulda, but instead of working, sits on her giant behind and complains that she is bored. The ugly sister fails to help Mother Hulda, so the crone is left to shake out her own featherbeds. At the end of her tenure with Mother Hulda, the ugly sister expects gold simply for existing. Mother Hulda gives the girl the gift she earned, which is to coat her with tar and send her back where she must dwell in personal filth and poverty for the rest of her life.

Brie "Captain Marvel" Larson is a plain Jane who got extraordinarily lucky, as is the current Disney incarnation of Snow White, Rachel "Weird, weird, WEIRD!" Zegler. They are privileged, ugly (mostly on the inside) sisters who go down the well expecting a prize for nothing. They are finding out that Meatworld can be extremely harsh, despite their past lucky streaks. Their movies do not have the beautiful music of Tchaikovsky to redeem them, so my guess is that those movies will sink into obscurity almost as quickly as they were created.

The moral of the story is not that Meatworld is fair: clearly it is not, or at least it is not fair in any way we humans can hope to understand. The moral is also that for whatever reason, expressing an archetype via a story can only happen by including dark along with light, pain with reward, struggle along with triumph. Like Tchaikovsky's music, there must be an interplay of light and dark, of major and minor, of dissonance and consonance. The key to uplifting the human spirit via a story seems to involve being honest about how difficult it is to suffer at Getting Better at a Thing, including becoming a better person. And if you are going to tell a good story, it does not help to have the gorgeous music of Tchaikovsky as your musical score.

New Substack!

This essay is the one I have used to launch my new Substack! I hope you will enjoy it in either place! If you join Substack as a free or paid subscriber, Substack will email you every time I publish a new essay, usually 1x a week on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

I recently went to the shopping mall to get a boba tea. For those of you not in the know, a boba tea is a cold, non-alcoholic drink popular in Taiwan. Boba often features tapioca pearls, which are chewy, sweet orbs of tapioca that sink to the bottom of the drink and that you are given a large straw in order to drink/eat. Boba is in this way a light meal of sorts -- it's more meaty than just a normal iced tea. The best kind of boba is milk tea: it is the creamier version of what I've just described. I am a vegan and boba is very easy to adapt for vegans. The tapioca pearls are vegan to begin with and the rest is just tea and sweetener. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who does not eat dairy, most boba places make milk boba tea with dairy products, usually in the form of creamer. I will explain this later.

So when I went for a celebratory milk tea to a place that had previously told me their milk teas were entirely vegan, I by chance decided to ask whether or not the milk teas were vegan as I am used to the process. The young man at the counter told me that indeed they were not vegan because they use dairy non-dairy creamer. What the hell is "dairy non-dairy" creamer, you ask? You see, because there has to be animal products in absolutely everything, most creamers that are labeled non-dairy have a tiny bit of dairy in them in the form of whey. In short, the previous associate was wrong about the shop's milk tea and the young man was correct. Despite being 100% right, he seemed flummoxed and afraid of me even though I was a good 1.5 feet shorter than him. I tried to reassure him that it was no big deal, thanked him for the information, and left.

I believe the young man feared me for two reasons: one was that vegans in general are often asshats (I too went through the vegan asshat phase) and because middle aged women are often Karens.

According to a user on Urban Dictionary, a Karen is:

Aged 44, has 4 kids (they listen to kidz bop) has a bob cut with blonde hair, annoying, doesn’t want to “calm down” and always wants to speak to your manager.

Karen : I would like to speak to your manager.
Cashier: Ah you must be Karen

by MiniMint November 22, 2019

There are entire social media channels devoted to recording the antics of Karens. Another, smaller army seeks to re-take the name and remove its negative connotations. UrbanDictionary.com was full of definitions of Karen praising the name and trying to redefine it as "a beautiful person" as well a frantic efforts to either portray Karens as vaccinated or unvaccinated in entries made after 2020. A little reading between the lines reveals middle aged women on both ends of the political spectrum who are terrified to be called out as Karens.

Dictionary.com and Wikipedia feature a similar definition of Karen:

Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.

A Karen of the Middle Ages, Literally

Though we think of Karen as a modern phenomenon, Karens are as old as civilization itself. The Icelandic Eyrbyggja saga is set the year 1000. When a traveling stranger named Thorgunna alights upon a tiny farm in Froda on the Icelandic coast, she brings with her a set of precious linens and quilts. The chieftain/farmer’s wife, Thurgid, becomes insanely jealous of Thorgunna’s luxurious bedding. She makes no secret of coveting the guest’s collection of bed wear and makes an array of obnoxious comments about it. She is nothing short of delighted when Thorgunna becomes sick. Thorgunna, knowing of Thurgid’s lust for her stuff, makes Thurgid’s husband promise to burn every single sheet, pillow, duvet, etc. upon her death. Thorgunna promptly dies and the husband fails to follow her orders. Instead of burning the bedclothes, he lets Thurgid keep them. The story then devolves into a mini-zombie apocalypse as a result of Thurgid's evil Karenning that involves corpses who come back to celebrate their own funeral dinner, a nasty thing that slithers around in the salted cod, and an undead, demonic seal. Fun!

Karen in Non-Zombie Literature

Fast-forward nearly a thousand years and Karen pops up again in the Edith Wharton novel Ethan Frome. Karen is called Zeena in this book and is once again a farmer’s wife. Zeena Frome is described thusly:

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light . . . drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its rings of crimping-pins.

Zeena — a cruel, manipulative, hypochondriac harpy — acts as the rocket fuel that drive her husband Ethan and her cousin/maidservant Mattie to a dramatic act of self-destruction.

Karen is Not Happy

The face that is most associated with Karen in modern times is that of Kate Gosselin, the subject of Jon & Kate Plus 8, a television reality show that documented the family’s life from 2007-2017. Kate, the mother of twins and then fertility drug sextuplets by her then-husband Jon, was the proto-Karen of the modern era. Her stripey blonde bob and control freak antics were all the more annoying by being shoved down our throats for ten years on cable TV. In essence, she was the first mommy influencer, blazing the trail for other abusive grifters to capitalize on the vulnerability and cuteness of her children. To nobody’s surprise, Kate and Jon were divorced by 2009. Their exploited, broken home resulted in obvious damage and unnecessary drama for their children.

Karen and Divorce

One of the ten thousand things that made up my mind that I would never have children in this lifetime was the observations of teachers I had in my long sojourn in public schooling. One of the few sane teachers I had in elementary school was a single woman with no children I will call Ms. Booker in interest of protecting her privacy. Ms. Booker was the only teacher who truly inspired me because she seemed to actually care for the 30 or so children she saw for six hours every day. The other teachers were often decent but mostly uninspiring. One bad apple teacher was so awful, she was forced to apologize to the parents of her students and other staff members for her behavior. I had the misfortune of being taught by Ms. Bad Apple. The pattern I noticed by the tender age of nine was that the teachers who were married with children were mediocre, those who were married without children were far better, and the single, unmarried teacher with no children was the best of all. The teacher who both had children and was divorced was Ms. Bad Apple, an entitled, bitter scold of a woman who frankly sucked at teaching and who should have chosen a career far away from children.

As we ask which came first, the chicken or the egg, we must ask which came first, the Karen or the divorce? Karen is a bitter and ungrateful person who makes everyone around her feel like they cannot do anything right. I would argue that Karen causes the divorce and divorce does not cause Karen; perhaps you feel otherwise. Gratitude is the secret of a long and lasting marriage, in my opinion, and without it, anyone in a long and committed relationship is going to have a bad time. If Karen is mean to perfect strangers in the grocery store and parking lot, just imagine how nasty she gets with her husband and kids when the cameras are off.

Karens in the Wild

As the Dictionary.com entry mentioned, Karen is nothing if not entitled. Medieval Thurgid felt entitled to her guest’s bed linens. Zeena Frome felt entitled to every penny her husband could scratch out of his farm while getting off on his misery. Kate Goselyn felt entitled to “easy” brand deal money at the cost of her children’s wellbeing.

When caught on video, Karens often stalk other people in stores, parking lots, and roadsides, demanding they kowtow to their demands. Karens believe they know the rules and they wield potential lawsuits like a superstitious mace. One video features a Karen hitting another woman and then freaking out and mock-collapsing in a Victoria’s Secret store, ostensibly because the woman got in her way during a free panties giveaway. Several videos show Karens stomping up to parked cars and trucks, demanding they move their vehicles because of some perceived law or rule that has been broken. One shocking video features a male Karen who insists a handicapped man cannot wheel his wheelchair down a forest preserve path because there are no vehicles allowed. A funnier video shows a skinny harridan Karen who berates some kids for ruining the forest preserve by eating too many berries and then breaking into a strange dance to illustrate her point.

Karens Everywhere: How Did We Get So Many?

Excessive Karens are the natural product of a materialistic, ungrateful society. When community is commercialized and relationships within the community become corporate caricatures at best, Karen emerges with her whip in hand, ready to subjugate the meek. Though Karen is associated with women of a certain age, Millennials are happily assuming the mantle; the Victoria’s Secret Panty Karen I mentioned in the previous paragraph is a Millennial. As William Blake said, you become what you behold. Spend enough time immersed in the fishtank echo chambers of greige office fauna on a steady diet of Facebook, online shopping, and Netflix and you too may become a Karen. Offices, schools, and malls are toxic places where the Karening leaks like a radioactive plasma spill. When life is framed as a boring succession of material achievements and mouse-find-cheese Instagram goalposts, the human brain responds by rotting and attempts to take the soul along for the ride.

Karen the Witch

As I mentioned, Karens are nothing new. In the old days, an old woman who made a silent career of throwing around malefic energy because of her general hatred for her community was called a witch. Though third wave feminists would have us all believe that all witches were wise and cunning women persecuted sheerly for being too good with herbs, some witches were actually persecuted because other villagers got tired of them throwing their bad energy around.

When I used to throw vegan gatherings, my get-togethers were frequented by a toxic, older woman who I will call Sylvia. Sylvia was obsessed with getting something for nothing. When I gave away vegetables from my garden, I started ignoring her calls because she pursued me so hard for them. When I hosted a free raffle for some kitchen stuff I was giving away, she entered her name on 20 slips of paper in order to game the system and win everything I put on the table. She did this when she thought nobody was looking. When another guest was backing out of a parking lot close to her old, beaten up car but in no danger of hitting it, she glared and scowled, worried that her ancient, dented car would suffer another dent. At a holiday gathering, she ate a to-go dessert that was promised to another guest right in front of her eyes. The irony of Sylvia was that she and her husband were very comfortable. One of my regular guests knew someone who was his co-worker; his salary was well into the six figure range. Sylvia had every reason to be generous and yet was consumed by worry that someone else had nicer things than she did.

I can easily see Sylvia being done away with if the year was closer to 1524 than 2024. A village only has so many resources. A wealthy resource-sucker like Sylvia who constantly wished harm on other villagers and who carried with her an aura of greed and ruin to every gathering would be all too easy to accuse of cavorting with demons. In its own way, lusting after free crap is a form of demon worship, but only of the most common and blasé kind that hardly deserves being burned at the stake.

Don’t Fight the Karen

Slinging arrows or otherwise avenging yourself on a Karen never works. Karen thrives on opposition and conflict; she is vampiric in that sense. If I ever find myself cornered by Karen in the mall, office, or forest preserve, I know not to react. I will zip my trap and be as mute and still as Tiger Lily on the death raft. I will also do my level best not to be Karen’s judge, because we all have a little Karen in us. The inner Karen we all possess is what makes us hate her so much. Anyone who has never acted in any way resembling a Karen is welcome to throw the first stone.

Despite the protests of toxic feminists, we are not currently living in an era of toxic masculinity. Males have been rendered impotent in almost every aspect, up to and including their dwindling sperm counts. Those of us who are of a certain age have memories of the toxic masculine era under our belts, which used to come attached to garters and remained unseen except in the bedroom.

Toxic masculinity reached its peak in the early 1990s, just as I was finishing my undergraduate degree at a middle-of-the-road musical college in Chicago, Illinois. Woke wasn't a thing. My first encounter with a wokester happened at the end of my undergrad time. A young man who was a fellow student shamed me for using the acronym BFE while casually conversing about a faraway place. For those not in the know, BFE stands for Butt-F**king Egypt. Having no previous encounters of the sort, I simply apologized and moved on. In hindsight, I now know that what I witnessed with the ritual shaming was the birth of Woke as a religion, and of course I witnessed it in the heart of Chicago, Illinois, the exact sort of urban center where it plies its trade.

For a short time, the push towards political correctness, self-policing one's speech to avoid hurtful stereotypes, and inclusiveness was nowhere near as bitter and Stalinist as it would eventually become. Woke had a honeymoon phase that I perceived as lasting from approximately 1990 to 2005 or so.

Back in Time

Once upon a time, I was a twelve year old with serious suicidal ideations. I have the gift/curse of being able to remember that time very well. The average school day began with me springing awake as my alarm clock blasted the Chicago radio station B96. The station played Top 40 hits: George Michael, Madonna. Despite his voice being on the radio ALL THE TIME, I had no idea George Michael was gay and neither did any of my family or friends. In between the songs, the DJ prank called random people and had somewhat racy conversations with his co-hosts. The rest of my morning was the hell of trying to make myself look presentable with my glasses, braces, gigantic hair, and cystic acne. There was often no time to eat, so I would slap together some Skippy peanut butter with a piece of toasted Wonder bread, wash it down my maw with Minute Maid orange juice, and go to school with peanut butter on my face. At 7 in the morning, my best friend stopped by (on foot) so we could walk to school together. Though it was kind of her to do so, I had no appreciation of it because I was jealous of her good looks, comparatively clear skin, and advanced ability to adjust to junior high school. She was normal, I was not. No matter how hard I tried, I could not overcome the environment of junior high. From day one, I had difficulty opening my locker, trouble making it to class on time, chronic fatigue, depression, and severe anxiety. To put the cherry on top of the cake, I began menstruating at 12 and suffered excruciating cramps. Though I should have used the opportunity to stay home, I was too much of a fool to do so for fear of missing out. I believed I was supposed to be having a good time and a good life, so I often convinced myself I was doing just that despite being suicidal.

The milieu was the toxic masculine 1980s. It was a man's world, baby, and we all knew it. The 80s were a time when gay men actually did get beaten to death in America for being gay -- Stephen King did not make that up whole cloth when he wrote a scene in IT where a gay man gets beaten to death by a group of straight thugs. No wonder George Michael was not out and proud except perhaps in his small circle of friends, agents, and recording executives. Popular media constantly threw it in our faces that a woman's value was based on her looks. Even the shoulder-padded, stiff-haired, business-suited career broad was stereotyped with a Patrick Nagle wet dream of a face and a Robert Palmer back-up dancer's body. My brother had a poster on his bedroom wall of Heather Thomas yanking her bikini up her scrawny hips with a thumb's up gesture. Some guys still had Farrah Fawcett or Kim Basinger on their walls. It hardly mattered. The message of the 80s pinup was simple and directed not at the boys wanking it with surreptitiously borrowed Almay hand lotion -- no, it was aimed squarely at the girls. The 80s pinups told us THIS IS WHAT PERFECT LOOKS LIKE AND THIS IS WHO YOU MUST BE. Of course we could not hope to measure up. Before there was Instagram, there was Photoshop, and because getting a photograph into mass market print was extremely difficult, Photoshopped images were often as convincing as the real thing. At least the young girls today have the benefit of seeing the Instagram hottie revealed in all of her fat-bulging, saggy, giant-nosed, fakery-exposed glory. Back then, Photoshop was the domain of professionals. I did not realize that every photo in every magazine of every woman was airbrushed, nipped, and tucked. No wonder I was so violently dysmorphic and so schizophrenic over what I saw in the mirror. I overvalued and undervalued my looks at every opportunity.

Toxic Monotheism

Spirituality is supposed to be a place you can turn when your life sucks as mine did in the 1980s, but the worst examples of toxic masculinity came directly from so-called religious leaders. At the very bottom, there were the materialistic church moms who meant well, but who worked without any true notion of the God they were extensibly working for. In the middle were the neighborhood pastors, comfortably numb, upper-middle class doofuses who had lucked into having their own church. Every weekend, they lectured about life as if they knew anything about what it is to truly live. Bland, timid suburbanites must invent reasons to lecture other bland, timid suburbanites, and the kept pastors scored symphonies of pablum in order to preserve their cushy, relatively risk-free work and housing situations. At the top were the televangelists, cruising around in their luxury jets and filling stadia with the tacky, the desperate, and the easily suckered. Also the apex was the Pope, and none dared question his pedophile-abetting habits until Sinead O'Connor sacrificed her career on Saturday Night Live one evening in 1992. Suffice to say that God did not seem to be anywhere near a Christian church or a Jewish temple, and to this day seems to avoid those places as far as I am concerned.

The Glory Versus the Actual Work

Outside the church, the same sorts of working astral pyramids dominated in the workaday world, with a huge army of women populating insurance offices, mortgage lenders, telecommunications centers, and retail floors. Every owner, media mogul, top producer, high level executive, leader, CEO, president, top lawyer, superintendent, et m. was male, yet the success of his organization was heavily dependent on an army of working women taken out of their homes in order to bust heavies 9 to 5 just as men had done in the career sector from pre-WWII years. Under the guise of female equality, women were expected to make a living while simultaneously making a clean, nurturing home and raising sane, disciplined children. Anyone who has even witnessed such circumstances knows that making top dollar in a white collar job while successfully raising children is impossible; there simply are not enough hours in the day. The bottom line was that a mass of women did most or all of the work, but the top of the pyramid was always male. Beta male managers were the appointed eunuchs watching over the harem of compliant females. The TL;DR is that women did all the work and men got all of the glory. Kind of like pregnancy, and it is no wonder abortions were so difficult to attain back then. A girl or woman who cannot abort a fetus for any reason is in a convenient position: she is trapped. She is the captive of a man's pleasure, and her life does not matter, especially not over the life of a human who is new to this planet. At her core, she will always be a slut who wanted it even if she was nine years old and raped by her uncle. It's a man's world, honey, and if you don't like it, kill yourself. I almost did several times.

Women Do It Better (Depending on What It Is)

The stereotype of men not being able to handle pregnancy is the quiet way in which women whisper among themselves that men are not capable of handling long term commitments where one must follow through such as carrying a child and then raising that child until she or he is an adult. The saying goes that if men could get pregnant, suddenly all birth control would be free and abortion would be safe and legal. I don't know to what degree I believe in that saying, but I highly doubt abortion would be anywhere near as stigmatized if both sexes could manage pregnancy with equal success.

The hard facts are that men do certain things better than women and women do certain things better than men. Of course there is no hard rule for this: I would not want to live in a world where Amelia Earhart never flew a plane by virtue of her being female or where men were shamed for being homemakers because it is largely a female occupation. When we look at the world of sports, men dominate because they are larger, more muscular, faster, and tougher than women. When we look at decorating, for the most part men don't have the knack that women seem to naturally possess. Women can see more colors than men (this is just science, yo) and women have more of an intuitive grasp of the flow of etheric energy within space. For this reason, my male-dominant, male-designed junior high school was a boxy, ugly prison. If school had been an elegant, comfortable, lovely space, maybe the energy there would not have been so unrelentingly, poisonously septic.

The Trouble with Wanting to be the Best

Men have a desire to be the best, and this is a seriously problematic way of seeing life. There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve, but when you have a pathological drive to beat out the competition in order to sit at the top of a powerful pyramid, this mode of thinking is a collective disaster. The corporate harem model of the workaday world with a man and his crowd of beta dudes administering armies of women can only elevate so many males. Just like any form of feudalism, the more kings forced to share limited resources such as labor and land, the more war will be had with king against king.

As a child, I was extremely preoccupied with adult thoughts and worries about how I would make a living one day. I was consumed with visions of being a responsible adult long before it was appropriate to think about such things. At age 9, I began teaching myself to type on a manual typewriter. By age 15, I could type 80-100 words a minute with perfect accuracy. I fantasized that I would be a well-paid secretary, dictating and taking calls and memos by day and returning to my pretty apartment in the downtown area of a quaint suburb via train at night to my cats and my books. Sadly, this vision never materialized as cost of living made it impossible. Little did I know that what I was actually good at (aside from typing) was teaching music, which is at best a bohemian existence unless you are one of the few willing to make an influencer presence out of yourself, which at this time I am not. Humans being what they are, I had a dual fantasy at the time of being a top singer/performer, and this was a far more destructive dream. No matter what, I was determined to be THE BEST at whatever my career was to be, and being a team player or just a participant held no interest. School bored me because I was seldom THE BEST and in fact, I won awards so rarely in school, I grew to hate it by the fourth grade.

It is the nature of women to cooperate, congregate, patch together, and manipulate. It is the nature of men to discover, conquer, and dominate. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these two natures. There is no labeling them as good or evil either. They are what they are.

Men have more of a need to be seen as experts as women, to "mansplain" without bothering to find out if the woman has more expertise on the subject. Women have less of a tendency to tie up their egos in being experts in any particular field. This is why until relatively recently men dominated the world of celebrity cooking. Aside from Julia Child, masters of cuisine where almost all males despite women being saddled with most of the cooking (outside of Army mess halls) for the last six thousand years. The fashion world is similar. Despite the fact that women have and always have made most of the clothing, men get the glory. Top female designers weren't much of a thing even during the halcyon days of Coco Chanel -- she was a tiny minority in a sea of male names such as Balenciaga and Fortuny.

The current debacle of trans rights has to do with men who are jealous of women and who insist they can become better at womanhood than actual women, as if anyone would actually want to do that. Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, rose to fame by outcompeting every female on her team. Among males, she only placed as number 16 or 17 in any given competition, despite being 6'1" and not suffering a monthly period. Lia had such a compulsive need to be THE BEST at swimming, she was willing to place herself in a kiddie pool of sorts to do it rather than being forced to lose among her fellow biological males. It is unsurprising to see female-to-male transexuals sinking into the wallpaper for the most part -- male to female has always been a far more vocal and attention-hungry segment of the trans population. For this reason, there is no burgeoning population of trans machine welders, Navy captains, and lumberjacks seeking the media's spotlights.

Males are the ones who need to be experts: they want to be the consulted, not the ones seeking consultation. For whether the male is a declared male or female, he needs to be Top Dog. This is the formula. To be feminine, quiet, unassuming, cooperative, and receptive means that the attention will not come and that you cannot seed the world with your influence.

Speaking of Influencers

Career influencers are essentially masculine by nature, even the ones who are mothers of eight and who make a living showing off their phases in home decor. They spermatically attempt to scatter themselves all over the world, seeking out receptive egg fields where they can plant their flags. In our current world where making an honest living is more difficult than ever before, the lure of influencing to fill one's coffers with cash and goodies is extremely tempting. Influencing makes it much easier to declare oneself an expert, even if it is only at looking pretty, while seeding the world with one's own self-manufactured celebrity. In spite of all I have just said, I have no problem with influencers; in fact, I follow many of them and support a limited few because they are often experts just as promised.

Back to the Future

In the 1990s, the tide started shifting towards toxic femininity, a subject to which I plan on devoting a full essay in the near future. The 1990s were far more tolerant of gay people and even somewhat kinder towards ugly, geeky 12 year old girls with braces, glasses, and unfortunate skin and hair. We began to see drugstore makeup shades in darker colors than Pasty White Girl. School bullies who formerly skated for beating up anyone who did not toe the Biff Tannen party line of BE LIKE ME OR ELSE actually started getting in trouble. The baby was not to go out with the bathwater until 2005 or so when internet censorship began getting out of hand and LGBT+ rights spiraled into a battle to install a neo-Marxist, Borg hive mind.

I have no advice to give in this case -- these are just my observations of dealing with toxic masculinity from the front lines of being a woman. This essay may become more than one as I may have more observations as time goes by.

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.

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.