part0010

In the book Columbus and Other Cannibals , indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years. After reading his book, it was clear to me that he was describing the same psychospiritual disease of the soul that I wrote about in The Madness of George W. Bush . I introduce the idea that from the dawn of human history our species has fallen prey to a collective psychosis which I call malignant egophrenia. Speaking about this very same psychic epidemic, Forbes writes, “For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.” 1 Indigenous people have been tracking the same “psychic virus” for many centuries, calling it “wetiko” in Cree (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan), a term that refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by means of evil acts. 2 Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the Native American movement during the early ’60s, says, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.” 3 Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a “psychosis” in the true sense of the word, a “sickness of the soul or spirit.” Though calling it by different names, Forbes and I are both pointing to the same illness of the psyche, soul, and spirit that has been at the root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself. There is no possibility of awakening from our collective nightmare without first becoming aware of what it is that is keeping us asleep.

As if performing a magic ritual, in exploring the entity of wetiko/malignant egophrenia, we first have to invoke its spirit and enter into relationship with it. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia needs to be contemplated “religiously,” 4 not in the dogmatic sense, but in the true meaning of the word, that is, carefully considering, with a sense of awe and reverence a living and dynamic agency that is conceived of and experienced as a numinous power greater than our own ego. We must contemplate and engage wetiko/malignant egophrenia as objectively as we are able, as if it exists outside of ourselves, lest we get too “mixed up” with the object of our contemplation. Due to its unique psychic origin, the epidemiology of wetiko/malignant egophrenia is different from that of any other disease. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko/malignant egophrenia virus is that it is incarnating in the very psyche which itself is the means of our investigation. We therefore need to examine the disease from a perspective that is as free as possible from assumptions created by the very disease being studied. If we are not aware of the frame of reference through which we are examining the wetiko/malignant egophrenia virus, our investigation will be tainted by the disease, obscuring the clear vision needed to start the healing process. Studying how wetiko/malignant egophrenia disease manifests in others, as well as in the “other” part of ourselves, will help us to see it more objectively. Seeing this psychological disease manifesting in the world is the looking glass through which we can potentially recognize this same illness as it arises subjectively within our own minds.

After evoking an entity like wetiko/malignant egophrenia, in order to study it as objectively as possible, we have to hermetically seal it within an “alchemical container” (see hermetic vessel in the Glossary). This ensures that its mercurial spirit doesn’t vaporize back into the invisibility of the unconscious, where it could once again act itself out through us. Though Jung wasn’t familiar with either of the names “wetiko” or “malignant egophrenia,” from his voluminous writings it is clear that he was very much tuned into this archetypal psychospiritual pathology of the soul. He was continually pointing at wetiko/malignant egophrenia when he would write about “the germ” of psychological evil. He emphasized the importance of developing a “container” (a word which, revealingly, has multiple meanings: to include, hold together, have capacity for, control, restrain and limit) in which to catch such troublesome and malevolent spirits. Jung writes, “Therefore, if anything is wrong, take it out of its place and put it in the vessel that is between your neighbor and yourself.… For love of mankind, create a vessel into which you can catch all that damned poison. For it must be somewhere—it is always somewhere—and not to catch it, to say it doesn’t exist, gives the best chance to any germ.” 5 Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is an elusive spirit that is challenging to pin down and say it is “this” or “that.” One of the first steps in studying wetiko/malignant egophrenia is to locate it, so that it can be “contained” and its qualities observed. This kind of effort, while likely to be successful to some degree, is sure to be confounded, in that there will always be aspects of wetiko/malignant egophrenia that are neither locatable nor containable. Though wetiko/malignant egophrenia is ontologically real, its nonlocal nature makes it nearly impossible to find in its entirety. The best we can do is to find local traces of its nonlocal, multidimensional field of operations. Being nonlocal, wetiko/malignant egophrenia is atemporal, which is to say it exists in a dimension outside of time, although its effects manifest in ways that can be clearly discerned within time itself. Adding to the complications, wetiko/malignant egophrenia exists in a place outside of place, a place that is not contained in a place, a placeless place located who-knows-where. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia has its own unique topography, existing in a world whose coordinates cannot be plotted in astronomical space and time or situated on our maps. This land of no-where where wetiko/malignant egophrenia exists is a place that is not in the geography of our three-dimensional world. Realizing this, the question “Where?” loses its meaning, at least in the terms of our sensory experience. Being nowhere in particular, wetiko/malignant egophrenia is everywhere in potential—even, or particularly, within ourselves, as it is of the nature of a state rather than a place. As if in a dream where the inner is the outer, we can recognize that the wetiko/malignant egophrenia virus that we have been tracking “out there,” outside of ourselves, is a reflection of and co-related to the same process within ourselves. But this insight ultimately brings us to the contemplation of who is the self that wetiko/malignant egophrenia is within, and where is this self to be found?

Though the place where wetiko/malignant egophrenia exists is impossible to locate, at the same time, it is critical that we attempt to delineate its properties. Unlike a physical virus, the wetiko/malignant egophrenia bug cannot be isolated materially, but its characteristic signature can be detected and seen in the peculiar operations of a psyche that is under its spell. To not recognize the existence of the wetiko/malignant egophrenia germ—“to say it doesn’t exist”—allows the psychic infection to act itself out unrestrained. Being “always somewhere” is to be nonlocal, which means that it is always around. In calling forth the wetiko/malignant egophrenia spirit, we are simultaneously creating, through our inquiry itself, the container in which we can study this bug so as to understand what in fact we are dealing with, to see how it operates in the world, in others, and subjectively, within ourselves. In order to come full circle in our contemplative exercise/exorcise, we have to homeopathically take our contemplation back within ourselves. Just like in the use of immunization and allergy treatments, a small amount of the pathogen or allergen is given to stimulate the immune response. As if giving ourselves a psychic vaccination, we inoculate ourselves from the disease by taking it into ourselves, for, as the healing art of homeopathy has realized, that which causes a symptom can also cure it. This process connects us with the mythological figures of the wounded healer or divine healer (such as Asklepios, Chiron, and Christ 6 ), who have to suffer through the sickness that they are able to cure.

This archetypal journey we are about to embark upon in our contemplation necessitates a shamanic descent into the darkness of our own depths. It is only by going through and making the darkness conscious that we arrive at the light. This book is a reflection of this very dynamic, for we start off by making a descent into the unconscious, only to come out the other side, into the light of consciousness itself. Encoded in the darkness of wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a revelation, something that is most important for us to know.

I gave myself creative license (a credential which is on file in the office of the divine creative imagination) to make up the name malignant egophrenia. It was not an easy name to come up with. One night two friends and I were hanging out and contemplating this nonlocal psychospiritual disease of the soul that we had all been tracking in our lives. I was writing the first chapter of The Madness of George W. Bush at the time, and we were trying to figure out what we could call this virulent madness that Bush was acting out on the world stage. We all knew a number of people in our lives who were embodying the essence of the same archetypal disease that George W. Bush was possessed by, and all of these people on the surface looked totally different in the way they were acting out this malady. We realized that this disease of the soul had an infinite multiplicity of forms in which it played itself out, but nonetheless it was the same underlying pathology. It was as if there was an “archetypal invariant” displaying itself in numberless variations out in the world. In this particular form of madness the healthy parts of the person’s psyche have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. We kept coming up with various names, sometimes even different combinations of words, but none of them felt right. In the moment when we came up with the name malignant egophrenia, we all knew that we had found the right name. Malignant egophrenia is a more Western and modernized name for what indigenous people called wetiko. A modern idiom for wetiko, “malignant egophrenia” is “wetiko” translated into the English language.

Most of the Native American literature I’ve found on the topic talks about the mythic dimension of wetiko in the sense that the wetiko monster is a sort of supernatural boogeyman who lives in the forest and who can eat or possess people; of course, this can be read symbolically to represent a psychological potential within ourselves. I very much appreciate Jack Forbes’s work, which translates the ancient indigenous mythology into a more psychological form, showing how it plays itself out in the modern world. In this book, I’ve unfolded and amplified the indigenous idea of wetiko, as well as Forbes’s conception of it as a psychological disease, based on my own living experience. Hopefully, in doing so, I’ve fleshed out the deeper psychospiritual underpinnings of the myth, while at the same time attempting to honor the indigenous tradition and translate its wisdom into a modern idiom.

Giving myself creative license once again (for this certification does not have an expiration date), we quickly realized that malignant egophrenia could be shortened to ME disease, which sounded like and suggested what it meant. The name “ME disease” is pointing to the very essence of what the problem is, that is, the grasping on to an imagined “me,” a sense of an independent egoic self, which doesn’t exist in the way we think it does. This clinging on to a false sense of self, this self-contraction around a false identity, is itself both the source of and the expression of wetiko/malignant egophrenia—hence ME disease. If someone said to me, “What gives you the right to name things?” I would respond by asking what doesn’t give me the right to create names to help articulate my experience. Naming is an intrinsic magical power that we all have, whether we know it or not. If this person then judges or condemns me for using my God-given power to name my experience, I would point out that they are suffering from what I call “Creativity Suppression Syndrome,” which is the name I apply to people who feel compelled to put down other people and try to stop them from expressing themselves creatively.

As if unwrapping and decoding a hidden spiritual treasure that had occurred to us with the force of a revelation, my friends and I realized that “ME disease” could also stand for something else—Mad Emperor disease, which is what happens when a person in a position of power falls prey to, becomes seduced by, addicted and attached to power. Coincidentally, all three of us had a Mad Emperor figure in our field. We all knew a certain person who was so taken over by ME disease that he was convinced that he was the Emperor of China. I’m not making this up or exaggerating in the slightest. Completely out of his mind, as his madness progressed, he didn’t just think that he was the Emperor of China, but had recently upgraded himself to being the emperor of the entire universe (see inflation in the Glossary). He was possessed by his unconscious in such a way that he was a full-blown wetiko/malignant egophreniac on steroids, an amplified, exaggerated caricature of the very madness in which we were so deeply interested. It was as if he were a living, breathing symbol, the revelation in human form of a primordial archetypal form of insanity that exists in potential in the depth of the collective psyche. It couldn’t have been more crystal clear that we had found the name for the madness that he was suffering from: Mad Emperor disease. No one could have convinced us otherwise.

Continuing to give ourselves even more creative license (a license that we are happy to share with anyone), my friends and I then realized that ME disease had a secret name—Middle East disease—as the madness that is being acted out on a daily basis in the Middle East is an acute outbreak in concentrated form of the very essence of this nonlocal disease. It is as if this formless, higher-dimensional disease of the soul that pervades the entire body politic is crystallizing itself in the Middle East, where it is literally as well as symbolically revealing itself through its localized inflammation for all who have eyes to see. This is similar to when a person is infected with the germs of a disease, they are dispersed all throughout the body until they concentrate upon the organ in which the disease will manifest. It is as if the world-body’s psychic infection has broken out in fully visible form in the Middle East, which actually gives us an incredible opportunity to study it so as to understand how to cure it. Once my friends and I realized these deeper layers of multidimensional meanings, each pointing at a different aspect of the disease, we felt that we had found the right name indeed.

It makes no difference whether we use wetiko (its mantric name), malignant egophrenia (its outer name), ME disease (its shortened, essentialized name), Mad Emperor disease (its inner name), or Middle East disease (its secret name). Each has a different vibration, meaning, and association. Active, living speech is a gesture, a vocal gesticulation mirroring how the world itself can be seen to be of the nature of an utterance. Wetiko to me “sounds” like a mantra, in that it is not a known, Western word associated with a literal, conceptual meaning in the same way that English words are. Mantras operate on the level of sound vibration, in that they carry a phonemic, sensual level of affective meaning which is not translatable into conceptual definitions, speaking to and resonating with a nonverbal part of our being. Mantras contain a magical power regarding the essence of what they are representing in the form of sound. Like a mantric word of power, the name wetiko feels like it is evoking and simultaneously dispelling so as to liberate what it is naming. The name wetiko also feels like it has the power imbued into it by the many Native American people over the centuries who have uttered, contemplated, and used it. It feels to me that by reciting the name wetiko over a long period of time, indigenous people have invested a psychic energy into the word, which feels empowered with their energy. It feels as if this psychic energy that is encoded and impregnated in the word wetiko is a numinous power that we can access when we pronounce or contemplate the word, or so I imagine.

The term “malignant egophrenia,” on the other hand, sounds like what it is pointing at. It joins together the conceptual meaning of “bad,” (the prefix mal- means something negative or bad; the word “malignant” refers to something bad that is growing and spreading like a cancer), “ego” (associating to misidentifying who we truly are and connoting a sense of self-importance) and “the mind” ( phrenia means “of the mind”—as in “schizophrenia”). This name evokes an image of what a “mal-ego” looks like, how it deviates our mind, and how it can spread like a contagion in the greater field. As if I were doing dreamwork and making associations, it makes me want to play with the word and spell it “mal(e)go,” which immediately suggests the negative patriarchy, an archetype (see archetype of the negative father in the Glossary) which is very related to malignant egophrenia. It is interesting how all of these interconnected associative links constellate around this name. ME disease brings to mind that no one is exempt, that this disease is about ME! “Mad Emperor disease” and “Middle East disease” evoke their own distinct images. We have freedom to use whichever name easily rolls off of our tongue. The psychic winds that help us to create language pass through our inner channels differently, informing how we language our experience in our own unique way. We can choose whatever name evokes the image, meaning, or energy we want to call forth, as each of the various names is illuminating a different facet of whatever it is we call it. We can even invent our own name, as long as it helps us to dis-spell the curse of not knowing the name. From this point forward, I am choosing to use the mantric name of the disease—that is, wetiko—for a number of reasons: to introduce this indigenous word into the popular vernacular, as well as to honor the indigenous traditions that have created this word, in addition to wanting to access the power inherent in its mantric energy, and finally, because it “sounds” right.

In order for our minds to comprehend something, there must be an appropriately structured neural structure called a “frame” that makes it possible to contextualize, make proper sense of, and mentally “see” the thing. Our understanding of the world is frame dependent: frames are the accessories with which we think. Frames are the cognitive, conceptual structures that enable us to put together, amplify, and activate ideas. When a truth is unseen it is because it is both unframed and unnamed; frames and names go together. A major reason why wetiko remains incomprehensible to us is that, in addition to not knowing its name, we are operating out of frames that render it invisible and unknowable. Wetiko is a semantic disorder that functions by deviating the very process by which we attribute meaning to our experience; it is therefore important to establish a proper frame in order to see it.

In framing our situation, it is important to recognize that one mode through which wetiko operates on our mind is through the activity of framing itself. Improper frames can be one of the most pernicious factors distorting our mind’s capacity to see reality clearly. In light of the very principle of framing, understanding frames requires a frame to be created so as to be able to appreciate the importance of framing. Words and language are elements of, defined by, and understood relative to frames. Without a word activating a frame, there is not a way for the mind to grasp the concept/reality to which the word is referring. This book is an effort to name and construct a conceptual frame around the complex idea of wetiko. Bringing forth the name(s) associated with this syndrome activates the conceptual frame to which it is linked; the combination of the frame and name acts as a net or container which “catches” wetiko.

It is not a coincidence that the development of wetiko corresponds to the rise of what Europeans choose to call civilization. The unsustainable nature of industrial civilization is based on, and increasingly requires, violence to maintain itself. Genuine civilization, in essence, means not killing people. In a famous witticism, when an English journalist asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he responded, “I think it would be a good idea.” Modern civilization, though outwardly highly developed, is inwardly very primitive and preadolescent, an institutionalized form of barbarism in modern drag. It makes sense that Native peoples would know about malignant egophrenia, as they were oppressed by civilization yet weren’t, at least initially, under the “curse” of modern civilization. Being under the sway of modern civilization can feel as if something foreign to our nature is being imposed upon us, as if we are living in an occupied land. Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind, a one-sidedness that seemingly disconnects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence among living beings. The wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity in human nature, or shall we say, our seemingly inhuman nature. Wetiko represents and inspires the worst a human being can do to another human being, and ultimately, to ourselves. This psychic virus, a “bug” in “the system,” informs and animates the madness of so-called civilization, which, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop, feeds the madness within ourselves.

Forbes continues, “This disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” 7 “Cannibalism” symbolically has to do with feasting on another’s soul. We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time. Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously—intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (among ourselves), collectively (as a species), as well as trans-personally (in a realm beyond our personal selves). Those afflicted with wetiko consume, like a cannibal, the life force of others—human and nonhuman—for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives. One example that symbolizes our self-destructive, collective madness is the oil companies’ destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of our planet. This is a full-bodied revelation showing us what we are doing to ourselves. Another example that both literally and symbolically illustrates the wetiko complex in action is the Monsanto Company’s genetically engineering terminator seeds that do not reproduce a second generation, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto for each year’s new crop. This makes survival impossible for many poor farmers, triggering a wave of suicides among them, while Monsanto grows richer from the process.

In essence, genuine predators, “full-blown” wetikos (which can be an individual person or the “person” of a corporation), are not in touch with their own humanity and therefore can’t see the humanity in others. Instead, they relate to others either as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. As if they are a different breed who is a more animal-like predator than ordinary human being, those who are fully taken over by the wetiko psychosis consume others’ lives, physically, emotionally, psychically, and metaphysically, beyond just the material body and physical possessions to the level of meaning itself. Wetikos are the “anti-artists” of our culture, embodying the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist who creates life-enhancing meaning that enriches the world without robbing others, a wetiko takes and consumes without giving anything back, continually impoverishing the planet, draining it of its resources. These anti-artists are also averse to the open-ended freedom of true artistic, creative expression, which they fear because it threatens their wetiko-driven world .

Many of us can’t fathom the level of evil to which full-blown wetikos have fallen prey and of which they are capable. They have a distinct advantage if we don’t recognize their predator-like nature. We can’t possibly meet their challenge unless we clearly discern what we are up against. As the old adage counsels us, it is important to “know your enemy.” The depth of depravity being acted out is so dark, however, that it induces in many a tendency to pretend that it isn’t really happening. When evil, for example, is being enacted by our own government, by those who are supposed to have our best interests in mind and are entrusted with our protection, it is intolerable to realize that atrocities are being perpetrated in our name; thus, the evidence has to be internally denied. This works to the wetikos’ advantage, as it allows them to continue to act out evil in a manner which is denied by and incomprehensible to us. Their evil is so off the radar of our accepted system of morality that it is practically beyond the ability of our legal system to redress. Our lack of imagination for the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential for evil, which further serves to enable the malevolence of wetiko to have nearly free rein in our world. We can’t afford to have a concept of evil that is too small. This is why Jung counseled us to develop an “imagination for evil,” 8 because being able to imagine the scope of evil that human beings can fall prey to, become instruments for, and act out empowers us to see the evil more clearly, as it appears both in the world and within ourselves, and thereby deal with it more effectively. Evil devastates any possibility of an intellectual response; the tools of the rational intellect are as helpless in coping with the aftereffects of evil as it was in preventing it. In our psychic blindness we are complicit in the spreading of the evil of the wetiko psychosis, a systematic evil whose depth and depravity is beyond the capacity of words to fully describe. Evil ruptures and paralyzes the ability to language our experience, creating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between language and the event it is supposed to describe. Finding ourselves confronted with that place of no words, we are forced to simultaneously discover and create a new language, a language which is universal and transcends language itself, a language known as art.

Being that wetikos are the anti-artists of our time, it can help us to understand and deal with the plague of wetiko by stepping into and seeing it in contrast to its antithesis, the archetypal figure of the artist. When I use the term “artist,” I am not using it in a traditional, limited way of meaning someone who is solely painting, drawing, or using some other particularized medium; this is too circumscribed and flatland of a conception of what an artist is. When I use the term “artist” I am alluding to the fact that we are all creative, multidimensional visionary artists and dreamers whose canvas is life itself. Art is not just an activity that results in products but, rather, is a way of being and mediating experience. The very act of verbally or nonverbally language-ing our experience, of giving creative shape and form to what is happening both inside and outside of ourselves is itself the process through which we, as artists, deepen our realization of what we are trying to express. The fact that our realization of what we are expressing deepens through the act of creatively expressing it is the litmus test which certifies our act of creation to be worthy of the name “art.” In creating a new form of communication, the work of art is both an expression of a more expanded consciousness, as well as being its initiator. Art attains its greatest numinosity and ability to affect others when the creator of the work of art is re-creating themselves and being transformed in and through the act of creating the work of art. The artwork then becomes a living testament to, encoded with, and a carrier of this experience of transformation, as if the work of art unlocks the door through which this transformation becomes activated in and transferred to others in an act of living transmission. The artist’s creative endeavors are timeless artifacts, which act like transducers of the semantic, symbolic power encoded in the human psyche. Contagious in its effects, art can “virally” spread via the unconscious of our species in a way which liberates and unleashes the latent, creative energy lying dormant in the unconscious of humanity, which has the power to effect real change in the world. Ultimately speaking, the real purpose of art is not merely to momentarily express ourselves so as to make us feel better, but to awaken us and make us free.

Like all of us, the artist suffers from the spirit of the age. The creative artist, like a shaman and magician, however, is able to be in-formed by and constructively channel, transmute, and out-picture the seemingly obscuring daemonic energies of wetiko in a symbolic form that takes away wetiko’s spell-binding power over themselves, while at the same time helping to nonlocally dispel the collective enchantment pervading the entire field of consciousness. Discovering novel, creative, and ever-evolving articulations of language to express experience is a “spell-casting” activity, in that it serves to dispel the veil of illusion which limited forms of language can cast which seemingly obstructs us from the true richness of our own experience. Creatively expressing what is moving us is the very act which liberates us from the compulsion of having to unconsciously re-create these energies (self)-destructively in a way that continually retraumatizes both ourselves and the world around us. In the figure of the artist, the creative spirit realizes itself through us, while at the same time we, as artists, reciprocally realize ourselves through it .

Not merely a personal energy, wetiko is transpersonal in nature, having a daemonic agency, arising out of the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious itself. A power of nature, the daemonic is not an objectively existing metaphysical entity in the Christian sense, but rather, is an archetypal function of human experience, a psychic as well as an existential reality in which we all participate. The daemonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, and perpetuate itself; it is the voice of the generative process within an individual. To quote the noted psychologist Rollo May, the daemonic is “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person [or group/nation] … the daemonic can be either creative or destructive [i.e., “demonic’] and is normally both. When this power goes awry, and one element usurps control over the entire personality, we have ‘daemon possession’ the traditional name through history for psychosis.” 9 [Please note: comments in brackets are the author’s.] According to May, violence “is the daemonic gone awry. It is ‘daemon possession’ in its starkest form. Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daemonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daemonic is expressed in its most destructive form.” 10 Being an archetypal energy that can take over and possess a person or a species, the daemonic announces itself by drafting people into its service, enlisting human beings as instruments of its full-bodied revelation of itself. People so possessed will be compelled to unconsciously act out so as to give shape and living form to this archetypal, daemonic energy in the third dimension. The daemonic draws power when it is not consciously re-presented in form. Not to recognize and creatively express the daemonic itself turns out to serve the demonic, unwittingly making us accomplices in the dark side of its life-destroying aspect. What remains unsaid in us is forever angling to come into view; it seeks its art. Seemingly inspired by higher powers, the artist is at the same time driven by powers from below that are arising out of the unconscious.

The daemonic is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains both the light and dark aspects of our being encoded within it in a superposed state, which is to say that hidden within the daemonic are the creative seeds of its own positive transformation and transfiguration. Both constructive and destructive forces are present in the daemonic simultaneously, and either energy can potentially gain the upper hand and manifest, depending upon how an observing consciousness interacts with it. If the daemonic is not honored and treated religiously , however, it constellates negatively and turns truly “demonic,” in the destructive sense of the word. The daemonic is made up of inchoate creativity not yet “made real” or actualized by the ego. Hidden in the daemonic is our inner voice, our guiding spirit, our angel, and our genius, what is referred to as our “daemon.” Encoded within the daemonic is our creative potency, which if distorted, misused, or unexpressed becomes self- and other-destructive. Developing a healthy and strong ego is crucially important in entering into relationship with and creatively expressing the daemonic energies within us. Unrealized creativity is one of the most destructive things in the human psyche. The creative artist is able to express, mediate, alchemically transmute, and humanize the daemonic into a communicable form that is beneficial for others, thus performing an invaluable and necessary service for human society.

Human beings are the conduits through which the timeless creative process that underlies and informs the human psyche as well as the world at large becomes expressed and actualized in linear time. Like living oracles, artists are mouthpieces for the time in which they live. Like psychic scribes, they are able to inwardly tune in so as to outwardly express and explicate the contemporary social context, the emerging zeitgeist, the implicate spirit of the age, while simultaneously giving shape to the deeper archetypal, timeless, and unconscious process which informs all ages. In creatively translating the daemonic energies being touched inside of themselves into a communicable language, the artist taps into forms, vibrations, and realizations that exist in the formless, atemporal realm—a dimension existing “outside of time”—as if they are discovering spiritually liberating treasures that are waiting to be formulated and brought forth when the time is ripe. Touching a chord deep in the unconscious soul of humanity, these mind-expanding memetic thought-forms (see memes in the Glossary), once expressed and released into the field, can virally spread rapidly with worldwide transformative and redeeming power. They exist in latent form in the shared collective unconscious of humanity, waiting to be activated and revealed so as to offer their gifts.

In becoming intermediaries through which the divine creativity expresses itself and is made real in time, artists are participating in a re-creation of the eternal play of creation itself. Like alchemists, creative artists are liberating the creative spirit of the cosmos, an act they could only accomplish with the “blessing” of the very creative spirit which they serve. Alchemists of the soul, creative artists are channels for the universe to autopoietically re-create itself in a uniquely evolutionary way. As the alchemists realized, humanity is indispensable for the completion of creation, which is to say that we ourselves are the second creators of the world. The archetypal figure of the artist is the alchemical transformer of wetiko and the healer of the world. This figure exists within all of us in potential, waiting to creatively express and realize itself so as to become active in creating a new world. Everyone is an alchemist who strives to give form to the unconscious. The wetiko epidemic that has been emerging into our world-system from time immemorial will be truly known only when we evolve the radically new artistic forms that the gravity, magnitude, and majesty of our subject requires.

Mythologically speaking, the figure of the “would-be hero,” which is all of us in potential, is always inhabited by a daemon. Having a daemon like wetiko taking up residence inside of us is the very thing that potentially “makes” us a hero. The Buddhist word for hero is “bodhisattva,” a being in the process of awakening (who among us is not potentially “a being in the process of awakening”?). Our heroic fight against the paralyzing grip of the daemon is initiatory, in that it calls forth our latent brilliance and creative powers. In coming to terms and wrestling with our daemon, which is to say ourselves, we create ourselves anew. With wetiko as our object of contemplation, we situate and create ourselves relative to it; it is our relation and we, its “offspring.” As artists wrestle with their demons, they are able to symbolize their experience in the form of their art. Having it out with the daemonic, like Jacob wrestling with the seemingly dark angel of God, artists are able to extract a blessing from the encounter, which imbues their work with a numinosity that can potentially influence (and “inflow” into) others who are receptive. It takes genuine courage to do battle with these internal daemonic forces and wrest from them the mythic “treasure hard to attain,” which is none other than our soul-filled selves. As we become accomplished practitioners of our art, we are increasingly able to alchemically transmute on the spot the potential destructiveness of the demonic into stimulators of our own creative lucidity. We have then given birth to our daemon in the form of our guiding spirit. Or rather, in that moment our daemon gives birth to us.