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By Root 5430 0

has gone badly amiss. The ruling order no longer exercises benign, harmonious or unchallenged sway. It may be that the king or the head of the household, the centre of authority, has become a Tyrant. It may be that he is weak, or has fallen sick, or is absent - or that his authority has been usurped by a Dark Rival. It may be that some monster or other force of darkness from outside the kingdom has intruded to threaten its security. The result is that things are in disarray, life is no longer flowing peacefully and happily. Whether we are looking at Odysseus's Ithaca or Phaoroah's Egypt, Beowulf's Heorot or Shylock's Venice, King Arthur's Britain or Robin Hood's England, the household of Cinderella or that of Count Almaviva, Robinson Crusoe's island or Sleeping Beauty's Castle, the Russia of War and Peace or the France of The Three Musketeers, the little `kingdom' of Ebenezer Scrooge or that of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, the little community of Amity in jaws or the entire galaxy in Star Wars, it is the same story. A state of conflict and confusion has arisen, division and disaffection rule. And this is because the little world presented by the story has fallen in some way under the shadow of the dark power.

Against this background of general disharmony we see the hero or the heroine of the story moving, consciously or unconsciously, towards their own moment of personal resolution. And almost every story we have looked at has centred round one of two general situations.

Firstly there is the type of story which shows us an essentially light hero or heroine who spends most of the story under the shadow of the dark power as it emanates from some source outside them. They are struggling, developing and working towards that eventual climactic moment when the scales can be finally tipped, the dark power can be overthrown and they can at last emerge from the shadows into the light.

The other type of story is that which shows the hero or the heroine as themselves the chief dark figure, casting a shadow over others. In this case also, the light, redeeming element eventually emerges from the shadows to overthrow the darkness and to end the story on a final image of wholeness.

In other words, from whichever perspective we view the drama, the essence of what is happening in the story remains the same. We see a world polarised between a dominant `upper realm' in which for most of the story the dark power has the upper hand - with its egocentricity, heartlessness and limited consciousness; and an inferior `shadow realm' which contains the potential for wholeness. Eventually, when all has been properly constellated, the scales tip and the centre of light in the story emerges from the shadows to redeem the corrupted upper world, to end division and to bring everything at last into a state of perfect balance and harmony. And this means not just for the hero and heroine themselves, but for everyone else around them in the world of the story who has been thrown into shadow (so long as they have survived).

We are thus left with two overriding images of the general state of things which stories can describe. The first shows human affairs under the shadow of the dark power, in a state of irresolution, uncertainty and incompleteness; and such a state may be characterised by four things:

(1) the aggressive and oppressive use of power;

(2) disorder and things not being as they should be;

(3) things being obscured or hidden, so that no one can see clearly or whole;

(4) a lack of proper feeling, love or mutual affection.

And when human affairs fall into such a state of sickness they have a tendency not just to remain static but to sink further into chaos and negativity until either they reach a catastrophe, or something happens to break the dark spell and to reverse the tendency upwards.

If this happens we may then see the other general state, that vision which is held out to us at the end of so many stories where the shadows are dispelled and where everything has suddenly and miraculously come out right. This means that:

(1) power