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By Root 5514 0

is seen in the myth of Icarus. We see Daedalus, in his light aspect as the ideal wise Father, telling his son that in order to hold onto life he must keep in a state of perfect balance. He must keep precisely between the opposites, by flying neither too high nor too low, because either will lead to disaster. But the immature boy is carried away by his egotism into imbalance and one-sidedness. Puffed up by his power to fly, he falls into the state of hubris, the cosmic pride which is the essence of egocentricity. Hubris defies the supreme law of balance and proportion which governs everything in the universe, and the inter-relatedness of all its parts. Blinded by the limitations of ego-consciousness to the sustaining framework of the laws of nature, out of harmony with the totality of which he is a part, Icarus recklessly flies up too near the sun, his wings fall off, and he plunges back into the sea of unconsciousness and death. In every sense he is `the boy hero who cannot grow up'.

The story of Icarus might thus be regarded as a pure distillation of the spirit of Tragedy. But usually, of course, the events of Tragedy are set in a more social context. Indeed we see them rooted in precisely that same web of basic human relationships with which we are now familiar, in the archetypal family drama. The moment has come to see how the patterns of Tragedy relate directly to the central drama we have seen emerging in the last few chapters.

To understand the essence of what is happening in Tragedy we must recall the two great principles of the Self which guide a light hero to the ultimate goal. He must show himself as perfectly balanced. Firstly he must be strong, in the positive masculine sense which gives him sovereignty over himself and proper authority over others. It is this which enables him at last to succeed to the `kingdom'. Secondly he must be open to the feminine: that which connects him with the world outside him and with feeling for others. It is this which enables him at last to be fully united with the heroine. It is the balance between these things which allows him ultimately to reach the goal.

But what happens if a hero remains centred not in the Self but on the ego? Firstly, his masculine strength, instead of being turned inward to give him control over himself and his appetites, is turned outward. It becomes merely an egocentric desire to win power, to assert himself over others. Secondly, his inner feminine, that which connects him to others, instead of expressing itself in selfless, unbounded love, turns into the selfish, exclusive love of passion or erotic desire. The egocentric hero is still driven by the urge to reach a goal: indeed this is the very definition of the tragic hero, as he finds the Focus for his dark desires. And when we look at the nature of his goal we see how it invariably corresponds in an outward way to that of the hero who is centred in the Self. He may wish to win power, to rule over a'kingdom, like Macbeth or Richard III. He may feel the overwhelming urge to be united with an obsessively desired `other half', like Humbert Humbert or Don Giovanni. But because he wants to achieve his goal for egocentric reasons the jigsaw no longer fits together.

This is what Tragedy is really about. It shows us the hero or heroine trying to achieve the goal but in the wrong way. Because of that `fatal flaw' they are unable to succeed. In fact Tragedy shows us everything we have become familiar with in the type of story which comes to a happy ending, but in an inverted form. The light hero is drawn up to his ultimate goal and finally liberated, by a balance between light masculine and light feminine. The dark hero is possessed and drawn downwards by the dark masculine and the dark feminine. Instead of seeing the world whole, the right way up, he is drawn into seeing it upside down, by that dark inversion which turns light into dark and dark into light: so that the people he is most obviously turned against are the very people who represent those values of the Self which he should be realising in