The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 15

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 15 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

Dante and Virgil, in the opening to the medieval epic poem, The Inferno, have begun their journey into the bowels of Hell. There are nine concentric, descending circles they must traverse, each dedicated to a certain group of sinners, each one more frightening and severe than the pervious. Dante, beginning a desperate search to find God, is extremely afraid. Virgil, the Latin scholar, is his guide.  The characterizations and descriptions of the groups of sinners in all the Levels, and their forever, eternal torment in Hell, provide stark and terrifying reminiscences of the events of our own lives in the acting out of our addictions. Dante’s and Virgil’s descent into and through Hell is necessary to get them to the recovery stages of Purgatory and eventually Heaven.

The sins and sinners of the Circles of the Inferno are organized generally in line with the Seven Deadly Sins, as promulgated by the medieval Church leading up to Dante’s time. Dante is using them both in a spiritual, political, as well as mythological sense.  They are dealt with by Dante according to the Church’s view of increasing severity:  lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence and fraud.

Forgetting about the nature of these offences for purposes of our analogy, it is interesting to see the horrific nature of the eternal punishments Dante describes for these sins.  From the point of view of pain and suffering, it is a vivid analogous journey of us in our addictions, before recovery, conveying the horror of what we all experienced in our disease.

In the descent, for example, they see souls wallowing in putrid muck and slime, others encased in frigid ice, or boiling in oil and pitch (“enormous bubbling boiling pitch”).  Many are on fire.  Those whose lives were engaged in endless violence “are steeped in a river of boiling blood.”  The greedy, those whose lives were lived as hoarders or wasters of money, are chained together “straining their chests against enormous (opposing) weights with mad howls,” railing at each other’s lack of restraint in life.

Finally Dante and Virgil reach the bottom of Hell, and come face to face with the Devil.  They then courageously claw their way over him to a hole in the earth and eventually emerge into day, on the other side of the world.  Here begins their journey to Purgatory. This confrontation and emergence, the subject of the next note, could be seen as a very vivid, if symbolic, inflection point for our own initiation into recovery.

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 14

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 14 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

The year 476 A.D. is seen as the year that ended the Roman Empire, an institutional bastion of power, wealth, and peace that had dominated the known world of almost 1,000 years.  It had been weakening for many decades, but the breakdown of its fundamental institutions and the advance of the Germanic tribes into the corners of the Empire finally resulted in the dissolution of the majesty that was Rome in the 5th Century.  What followed in Western and Central Europe was 500 years of declining culture, scholarship, civil order and peace, a period called the Early Middle Ages, also the Dark Ages.  The Christian Church, which was ruled, if loosely, by a Holy See in Rome, was the dominant institution and much of the more repressive elements of Early Christianity found their initiation and resurgence in this period.

Beginning in the 10th and 11th Centuries, the roots of scholarship and development began to resurface, enabled by a number of trends; and one piece of artistic majesty that emerged at the end of this was a literary survey of the spiritual, social and religious belief systems of the Middle Ages.  It could also be seen as a spectacularly large analogy for our journeys from the depths of addiction to the sunlight of sobriety.  It is called The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri.

It is fiction, written in the first person, with Dante as the protagonist; and it has Dante as a 35 year old man, mired in an aimless life, desperately trying to find his way to God.  To do so he must travel though three realms, each a separate part of the book, Hell (The Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso). Written in complex verse, it is also quite explicit, especially with regard to The Inferno and it has been said that the grossly horrific images of Hell portrayed by Dante in The Inferno are the source of much of the Judeo-Christian West’s terrifying view of Hell over the past 800 years.

Dante is in a dark place when he begins, but he is aided by Virgil, the famous Latin poet, who becomes his guide into and through Hell. The task is to get through a series of nine descending concentric Circles, each of which deals with a certain set of evils and sins, with each descending Circle a more severe one than the previous.  Dante and Virgil are but travelers through these descending circles so they are witnesses to the sufferers, but the poignancy of what they see and the experience of it all are worthy of the analogy we are building here to show the comparisons to our Journeys.

I will leave it to my next writings to explore some of the more poignant comparisons of their horrendous experiences in Hell and then of the eventual move on to Purgatory and Heaven.  But to close here, before we begin our exploration into Dante’s psychic renditions, it is worthy to recite the carving above the Entry Gates to the Inferno in the story. It is an inscription that clearly recalls our deep despair when we were mired in our disease: “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.”

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 13

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 13 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

In the Fellowships of 12 Step Recovery, it has been said that the dues for membership is relatively cheap; they only require a desire to stop the destructive consumption or behavior.  It is also said that the cost of entry, the initiation fee, is monumentally high, reflecting all the horrendous things we did over our lives to earn the qualification.  The first three steps deal with all of this and are what we must accomplish to fully commit to the Fellowship.

But it is the first step that always must be done first…and fully…the full admission to the powerlessness of the drug or behavior and the unmanageability of our lives in the disease. These two parts are critical…and the failure to admit to both will always leave us nowhere, in limbo.

In the original Ghostbusters movie, the ancient Sumerian evil Deity, Gozer, is trying to inhabit the Earth in a physical form.  He recruits/possesses Dana Barrett and Louis Tully, played by Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis.  These two live on the top floor of the Shandor Bldg on Central Park West in New York, the building that is referred to in the movie as Spook Central.  Dana and Louis become Zuul, The Gatekeeper, and Vinz Clortho, The Keymaster, respectively.  The Shandor Bldg had been designed as the perfect entry vehicle for the forces of the paranormal to enter the real world.  Zuul and Clortho are to be the key operatives in the opening of this passageway for Gozer, on the roof of Spook Central.

Does it strike you as it does me that Zuul and Clortho are uncanny representations of the two requirements of powerlessness and unmanageability that give us our credentials for this Fellowship of ours. Our powerlessness and unmanageability are the gatekeepers and keymasters of our entry into the disease and the Fellowship. Thinking of the grim final scenes on the roof of Spook Central and how grim our lives were in this disease, the parallel strikes me as.…well….striking.  The forces for good, the four Ghostbusters, are almost overcome by Gozer, the Destroyer.  A wonderful light twist is added when one of the Ghostbusters, Ray Stanton, played by Dan Akroyd, in response to a challenge by Gozer, imagines The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man as the real-life personification of The Destroyer.  Doesn’t this also portray how we can trivialize our disease as we are struggling to fully grasp its destructive power?

But I can also turn this analogy around, from the Dark Side to the Light.  Step One requires admission of powerlessness and unmanageability, the manifestation of a real-life Zull and Clortho, The Gatekeeper and The Keymaster.  The admission of these two, if executed correctly, also give us entry into the Fellowship…and it is the Fellowship that begins to open us up to a world of Light and Joy, a Sunlight of the Spirit.  If we do the step correctly we turn them into a wonderful doorway. They are a true gatekeeper and key master.

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 12

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 12 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

The Star Wars series, now in its 7th rendition of prequels, base story, and sequels, talks of a series of fictional cosmos-wide struggles between the forces of good and evil.  The base story portrays how the Galactic Empire ruled by Emperor Palpatine, is building a Death Star which can destroy entire planets. It is this Death Star which Palpatine intends to use to crush the Rebel Alliance seeking to overthrow the oppressive Empire.  A core element of the story is the idea of a powerful energy, a Force, underlying the totality of all things.  Key warriors in this cosmic struggle, called Jedi, supporting the Rebel Alliance, have the ability to tap into the Force and use it for good purposes to serve the people of the cosmos.  But others, warriors in service to the Emperor, have migrated over to a Dark Side of the Force and are using it to advance the power of the Empire.

It is eerie how this idea of a “Force,” with a good and dark side, could be used to describe the spiritual, psychical elements of addiction and recovery that we struggle to understand in our pursuit of recovery. Continue reading “The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 12” →

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 11

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 11 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

In Norse Mythology, encompassing the mythic stories of many of the ancient northern European cultures, the tales of Siegfried and Brunhilde are very present. To many of us, they are most familiar in various parts of Richard Wagner’s cycle of operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, composed and premiered in the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Germany.  Siegfried and Brunhilde are star-crossed lovers, enduring all kinds of hardship, treachery, and misfortune in efforts to be together, only to die vaingloriously, in the end, unable to overcome the difficulties fate has put before them.   For some of our own brethren, caught in the never-ending trappings of the disease of addiction, Continue reading “The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 11” →

The Lifelong Quest For Sobriety…The Ultimate Hero’s Journey—Part 10

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 10 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.

In the great J.R. R. Tolkien story of The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Frodo Baggins, is given the task of destroying the One Ring that brings enormous, invincible power to anyone who wears it. A Dark Lord, Sauron, who originally forged it, is trying to re-capture it to complete his takeover of the known world, called Middle Earth in the story.  It is in the Council of Elrond where it is decided that the One Ring must be destroyed by throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom and it is Frodo who accepts the mission.  The other attendees of the Council, princes of different parts of Middle Earth, form a Fellowship pledging themselves to protect Frodo in his mission. The central story of Tolkien’s trilogy, then, is the working of the Fellowship of the Ring, through enormous struggles, to facilitate Frodo’s completion of this task.

The story can easily be read as the One Ring being the curse of alcoholism and addiction. While there is no one sufferer of such a disease in the story, Frodo and the Fellowship supporting him pursue a series of journeys very much like our own in the pursuit of Sobriety.  They encounter incredible hardships and battles trying to gain the ultimate advantage over the evil of the disease.

The powers of the One Ring are strong and at various times they almost tempt Frodo and members of the Fellowship to fall under its spell and relinquish the Journey.  As the story builds, its power to corrupt builds as well and the agony of the Journey resonates more and more loudly with the ideas of addiction recovery.  But Frodo, with the support of the Fellowship, as our Fellowship supports us, is successful and peace returns to Middle Earth, the ending conveying a wonderful sense of serenity for all, a sense of serenity not unlike the feelings that surround us when we begin to bask in the glow of Recovery.

The closing scenes of the final episode in the Trilogy convey the sense of serenity and joy that has returned to Middle Earth…echoing the serenity, strength, and hope that can overwhelm us as we feel that glow…