The Knight's Quest
The Knight's Quest
or, Active imagination as a mystic practice
The Call to Adventure
The first guide we meet in Spiegelman’s journeys in active imagination is a medieval European knight, wearing black armor emblazoned with a golden sun. The Knight becomes the narrator and subject of the active imagination session that ensues, beginning with the image of a vicious King living in a hollow shell at the bottom of the sea. Even from his far-off shell, the King’s dark thoughts cause all sorts of suffering in the world. No one suspects a sunken King as the source of all evil, nor would they know where to find such a King if they did. People simply live with a sense of distrust or pursue distracting pleasures.
The latter is the course taken by the Knight when his story begins, walking his horse carefree through a forest when an Angel of God appears. The Angel is stern and firm, giving the Knight his mission:
“Knight,” he said, “you have sought after adventure and pleasure. That is all right for a young man, but something more must be made of your life now. It has been decreed that you be sent to the vicious King at the bottom of the sea, and that you reform him or kill him, as you see fit. There is to be no reward for this. Your only recompense is that you do something more with your life than you have thus far.”
This is a perfect example of the call to adventure, which the writer and professor Joseph Campbell identified as the start of the Hero’s Journey, a recurring pattern in storytelling traditions around the world. For the Knight, the call to adventure is the awareness of suffering and evil. His quest to either reform or kill the King presents the two available approaches; either battling evil at its source, or transforming it into something good. These are two ways to confront the problem of suffering; working to minimize it, or making it serve some greater good.
The Angel does not wait for a reply, and leaves with no further instruction. The Knight is unsure how to proceed. But his horse knows the way, and he allows it to guide him.
Confronting the Source
When the knight reaches the bottom of the sea he finds the King in a hollow shell, like a monk’s cell or a cave. The King is aware of the Knight’s mission, telling that for centuries brave, young knights have been sent on the same quest. The King tells of how he ruled a happy kingdom which fell from grace, until sadness and anger turned the people against each other. When the same Angel that met the Knight appeared to him, it chastised the King’s pride and declared that he must give up his rule and have his son be crucified. So it was, and the King retreated in sorrow to his shell.
The Knight is taken back by the strange, pitiful humanity of the King, questioning if the Angel of God is the true evil one. But the profound nature of each encounter breeds confusion in the Knight, who trusts his horse to carry him back to the Angel. When the Angel appears to him in the forest once more, it is a gentle being. The Knight struggles to reconcile this paradox.
The Angel sheds light on the situation, that the King at the bottom of the sea is God Himself, who became ashamed and rejected His power. That power, without a guide, came to rule as madness in Heaven. Unable to confront His own darkness, God split into pieces.
And here is where the Knight’s true mission is revealed; to meet each piece of the fractured God and let them know where the other is.
Reuniting the Whole
The Knight’s journey brings him before many different aspects of God: an all-seeing, yet crying Eye; a misunderstood son, the Snake burdened with knowledge and seeking its place. And this masculine God has its feminine parallels as well, less intellectual, but far more tangible. We will explore Jung’s concept of the Anima, or feminine aspect of the unconscious, further in our next journey. For the Knight, the Goddess reveals herself to be the realm of experience:
“For, you see, my realm is life. My realm is love and hate and connections… People experience Me and are shaken. They are shaken out of their masculine will and whisper of reincarnation, of soul-mates, of brothers, of sisters. In short, I am She who brings about union and its opposite. You ask for meaning. Do you not know that there is no meaning without Me!
…But you only have to acknowledge Me, to expect Me, to understand Me, for I am not opposed to your blessed consciousness, I am only opposed to its one-sidedness. That is My nature, to bring together.”
The Goddess is warm, yet sad, as though experience has hardened her. Our physical world of experience can be violent and cruel, seen as creatures descend upon Her, the Knight, and Her Daughter. But the malevolent creatures are stopped by new creation appearing from the mouth of a great Mother Goddess.
The Knight, having encountered each part of the fractured Divinity, aware that he himself is fractured as well, has a vision of their union. The Eye of the Father, the King as Brother, the Snake as Son; and their parallel, the Mouth of the Mother, the radiant Goddess as Sister, and the innocent Daughter. Each of these relationships are joined in the symbol of the Star of David.
Their union, the Knight says, will bring about the Messiah, a new creation, the Second Coming for the Christians and the First for the Jews. This mystical message and messianic vision communicate what is at the core of the Jungian mission, uniting our fractured unconscious minds.
The Divine and Our Minds
Spiegelman is clearly a well-educated and creative individual for whom active imagination has profound results. Through the journey of the Knight he is able to start with a fundamental theme (the problem of evil and the call to adventure) and bridge the worlds of meaning and matter, potentiality and actuality. Through the exploration of his own flow of consciousness, Spiegelman encounters metaphysical forces and paradoxes which are more often approached in mystic traditions than scientific ones.
The question of how much the Knight’s journey reflects Spiegelman’s personal one is certainly worth raising, along with whether this should be taken as a reflection of the collective unconscious or the author’s personal unconscious. Like Spiegelman, the Knight is a Jew living in a primarily Christian society. The way that he explores the relationship between humanity and divinity certainly echoes the Jewish notion of God lifting Man to Heaven while Man brings God down to Earth, which is explored in Chabad and other Hassidic Jewish traditions. Yet at the same time, the Knight describes himself as being, in his heart, “also a Christian, and an ancient Greek, and some others as well.”
Relating this profound mystic experience to the individual level is exactly the subject of the Knight’s final adventure, which we will explore in the next post.
This seems to dig and tug deep in Spiegelman's psyche. And as an aside, it might show a main difference between storytelling and active imagination, in the sense that a story usually has the impact on the reader as the main goal. Active imagination seems more like stumbling around in the deep of you own inner world and discovering unresolved or contradictory parts of your partly unconscious world.
To his thoughts, maybe there is something about his own ideas about the source of evil, mixed with his own feelings of not having done enough for the good in the world. The notion of a God, as the force of Good, that is hiding and ashamed and splintered sounds more like something in Spiegelman, than a collective unconscious or transcendent wisdom. It might be a "remapping" of the true Divine to his own guilt of not doing "enough" in its service. Especially the combination of that image and the points about not seeking the source of evil but pursuing distractions or living with distrust instead. Maybe it was something in his time - or from his life experience. And also, the feeling of dis-unity is not necessarily a collective condition, nor necessarily how it should be by nature. It could even be his own mind giving him clues to how to unify his own psyche (in a right hemispheric way), in the Divine light. Wonder if he ever read Dante, and if so, what he thought of it.