Highlights

Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 16 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, having finally escaped Hell, the Inferno, find themselves traveling through the Earth into the light of day, on the other side of the world. Now they must traverse upward, through the circles of Purgatorio. In the Church of the time, Purgatory was a place where souls, otherwise in God’s grace, needed further purification, further temporal punishment to become holy enough to enter Heaven. In Dante’s poem, Purgatory is effectively the reverse of Hell, structured as a mountain with rising terraces, each dedicated to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, in reverse order from The Inferno. Each terrace is where souls with one of the sins encounter a process of purification dictated by the representative sin.

The punishments are much less severe, temporal in length, and designed to “correct” and “purify” the soul.  We could see this as a representative parallel to our efforts in our early stages of Sobriety.  This seems a reasonably good parallel to the practice of working the Steps of Four through Nine.  We must record our history in the disease and then reveal it to another.  From this we identify our “defects of character,” ask God for their removal, and then work to correct the effects they had on our life by seeking forgiveness from all those we had harmed.

Having achieved such a purification in Purgatorio, the souls reach a pinnacle, a sort of paradise on earth.  The top of the Purgatorio mountain is just such a paradise, it is the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. For us, this could be seen as a place of Steps 11 and 12, where we develop the conscious contact with God and begin to practice the principles and pass on the revelations.

From here, Dante proceeds on to Heaven, Paradiso. Virgil has had to leave him in Purgatory, since, in the beliefs of the Church of the time, his not being a Christian has obviated his worthiness to enter Heaven. In his place, Dante has connected with Beatrice, the love of his early life and the symbol of purity and perfection, and she becomes his companion in Heaven. They ascend above the Earth, traveling to the Moon and the Planets, each housing a realm more beautiful and bright than the one before, until finally reaching the company of all the angelic beings and the Trinity.  The brightness and serenity of this final place is a perfect representation for those of us in the glow of fully committed Sobriety, perhaps the most perfect rendition of the “Sunlight of the Spirit.”

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.

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.