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By Root 5436 0

form, hijacked into the service of a collectivised ego. As Verkhovensky infects his little group of followers with his revolutionary vision, so all their individual egos are merged and given a dark energy by a negative inversion of the power of the Self. They imagine - or Verkhovensky imagines for them - that by destroying all the existing corrupt social order, they are going to bring Russia in some distant future back to a glorious state of wholeness, even if this requires appalling bloodshed and the deaths of millions along the way. In The Possessed this collective fantasy based on the `ego-Self confusion' is portrayed only in local terms and when it is unleashed, spreading chaos and anarchy through the town, it soon winds to a hideous catastrophe, leaving `normality to re-emerge. But in history this dark inversion of the power of the Self was not to remain localised in just one corner of Russia. It was to possess the whole country. It was Dostoyevsky's intuitive insight into the archetypal forces already at work beneath the surface of Russia's disintegrating society more than half a century before 1917 which gave his novel such immense prophetic power.

We have now seen how the psychological root of all tragedy, the `fatal flaw' in all tragic heroes and heroines, is ultimately the same. They are stuck at a certain stage in the unfolding of the archetypal drama, in such a way that they cannot move forward to the point of Self-realisation. All of them are in some way held back by the dark feminine, so that they cannot grow up. They cannot develop either the masculine or the feminine aspects of themselves completely. Some, like Macbeth or Antony, may seem to be developed on the masculine side, although when the test comes, their dark feminine drags down and destroys even the masculine strength they possess. In almost every other example we have looked at, the hero is more obviously weak from the start: a boy hero who cannot grow up. And the more the dark feminine asserts its hold over them, the more they are drawn into conflict with the world of `Father, the masculine values of strength, discipline, firmness and self-control which they cannot develop in themselves, and which would be essential for them to achieve the full state of manhood.

What lies at the heart of Tragedy therefore is always the same problem; and again it confirms the way in which the positive development of the masculine and feminine values must go together. A hero cannot be fully a man, fully strong, unless he is also selfless, inwardly feminine. So closely interdependent are the two that if he is not light in both respects, he must inevitably become dark in both respects.

We see this just as clearly in the stories centred on a heroine, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Just as the dark hero is always inwardly possessed by the dark feminine, so these heroines appear to be victims of the dark masculine, the dark animus. But the very fact that each is inwardly possessed by the dark masculine turns her outwardly into the dark feminine. Both Anna and Emma are beautiful women whose personalities are taken over by a raging, wild, reckless egocentricity which gradually cuts them off from all the world. The true feminine values, feeling for others and the ability to see whole, cannot by definition be egocentric. Both these heroines are thus cut off by the dark masculine from contact with the feminine within them, until everything in them is dark.

The pattern behind all the examples we have looked at in this chapter is so engrained in the human psyche that stories have been endlessly repeating it for thousands of years. And, as we have seen, there is nothing inconsistent between this pattern and those which shape the other kinds of story we have looked at, which show the hero or heroine finding their way at last to the state of wholeness which is the Self. The fundamental rules which govern each type of story are the same. In each case the cosmic values of the Self are always ultimately triumphant. The ego, in separating itself from the Self, must always