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Vampire lore informs us that holding up a mirror to someone possessed by the vampire archetype is a dangerous task and should not be attempted lightly. Not casting a reflection in the mirror, people playing out the role of psychic vampires are not able to reflect upon themselves. Interestingly, philosopher Hannah Arendt points out that an inability to self-reflectively think about ourselves is one of the primary characteristics of evil.

In the alchemical treatise Corpus Hermeticum, the soul is admonished to save itself from agnosia (unconsciousness). The text says, “But first you must tear off this garment which you wear,–this cloak of darkness, this web of unconsciousness, this [prop] of evil, this bond of corruption, this living death, this visible corpse, this tomb you carry about with you, this inner robber.”

“We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.” (John Wheeler, At Home in the Universe)

It reminds me of the poet Milton’s words describing Satan, “This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway.” Instead of being “put on,” this “false body” needs to be seen through and “put off.” Blake refers to the false body of Satan as an “empire of nothing,” and says he is “Satan this body of Doubt that seems but Is Not.” If I don’t see through this false body, this “body of Doubt that seems but Is Not,” I am then in danger of identifying with it, in which case I would be complicit in being replaced by a pale imitation, false duplicate and toxic mimic of myself.

St. John writes, “The divine touches the soul to renew it and to ripen it, in order to make it divine, to detach it from the habitual affections and qualities of the old man, to which it clings and conforms itself.”

It brings to mind the Mark Twain quote that Jung cites in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “The greatest force on earth is mass stupidity.” Jung comments, “Stupidity is the extraordinary power and Mark Twain saw it.” It makes me think of Jung’s description of “normal” people as “ridiculously unconscious,” elsewhere he refers to the “barbarous unconsciousness” of humanity.

It makes me think of a quote from the scientist Carl Sagan, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The Bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken…it’s sometimes earlier to reject strong evident than to admit that we’ve been wrong.”

The “persona”, according to Jung, “is that which in reality one is not,” which is to say it is not who one is but the mask one presents to the world; it is who one “seems” to be. The word “persona” is taken by Jung from the Latin word for “actor’s mask.” Talking about the disincentive to step out of identifying with our persona, Jung writes that “the temptation to be what one seems to be is great, because the person is usually rewarded in cash.” In order words, our culture provides benefits for people to identify with who they appear to be, rather than who they truly are.

It makes me think of Nietzsche’s words, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

In one of my favorite quotes, June writes, “Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situation sin which the great ‘principles’ entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out…Here a man can do nothing but stand his ground.”

To quote visionary Buckminster Fuller, if we are not full of imagination, we are “not very sane.” The world of the creative imagination is as ontologically real as the world of the senses, and its contents have a living reality all their own.”

It is the alchemists’ version of true imagination that Einstein was referring to when he famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

This reminds me of the Kabbalah’s insight that a “sinner” who “repents” (which etymologically, has to do with a “re-turning”) is on a higher level than the saint who has never sinned.

One of the inner meanings of “Satan” is “that which obstructs.” The heroic, creative life is always threatened, as if the obstructing forces are tests, guardians of the threshold of evolution. This archetypal dynamic has been symbolically represented from time immemorial in numerous myths and fairy tales. And yet, these obscuring and oppositional forces help us to build up the muscle of realization, which is to say that from the cosmic perspective, though apparently obstructing our true nature, these forker forces ultimately serve its realization.

–Paul Levy, Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father