Magick Without Tears

342 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS droPt'ed like vitriol from his lips: "You - young - fool! You go and put the most tender part of your body where I wouldn't put my umbrella!" It is the magical formula of a man to push outwards, of a woman to close upon from without. This is commonly seen as the possessive instinct ; it may often be masked as "protective" but its essential truth is the impulse to devour. Hence the death-like idea of "home ," where she can digest her victims in security and at leisure. Hence, as even Jung saw in his very first book , and wrote in stated terms, the first task of manhood - of the "hero"-is to escape from the mother. Now the son, with his male formula , his formula of life, his instinct to push out, to break down all that would restrain him, finds it perfectly natural to "bite the hand that fed him," as the complaint might piteously wail. But the daughter has no club to smash, no sword to cut ; all she can hope to do is to pass the buck . The amoeba, born of fusion , nourished by wrapping its pseudopods around such drifting particles as come within its scope, is but a parasite on its own dam until the fusion is complete. So, when a woman is "so good," "so devoted to her daughter," God help the daughter! She is never allowed to think for herself in the minutest matters ; she is bound hand and foot remorselessly to the routine of her "decent Christian home"; a wageless kitchen-slut. No hope of escape unless the mother's vampirism takes the form of seIling her off to the highest bidder . Need it be added that the "good mother" is usually quite unaware of all this, will read these simple statements of plain fact in speechless rage? But the truth stands: the woman-formula is Death: "return to the Great Mother" is the catastrophe of the hero , whether he be Coriolanus or Peer Gynt. It is surely unnecessary to state the rider to this theorem; so perhaps I had better.