War:  In the Christian tradition, angels fight devils.  In the Hindu tradition, gods (devas, "shining ones") fight their older siblings, demons (ashuras).  In ancient Greece, Olympian gods fight their older siblings, the Titans.  In the Navajo tradition, the War Twins fight monsters with sacred weapons won from their reluctant father, the Sun, who is also father to the monsters.  In the Celtic tradition, the newcomer Tuatha De Danaan fight the older Fomorians.  In ancient Egypt, Sun-god Ra and all his followers, fight the evil serpent, Apopis, and emerge victorious every dawn.  In Mesopotamia, Marduk and his companions slaughter old Tiamat, the she-dragoness and mother of them all.  In medieval Europe, knights fight fearsome dragons.
War is always an "us" versus "them."  Thus all the conflicted dualities emerge and are turned into explosive issues by the spin-doctors and PR people on both sides: good/evil, light/dark, human/beast, farmer/herder, city/city, country/country, Christian/Christian, Christian/Jew, Christian/Moor, Jew/Jew, Jew/Moslem, Moslem/Moslem, Moslem/infidel, white/black, red, yellow, and brown, rich/poor, educated/uneducated, aristocracy/commoner, North/South, East/West, land-owner/tenant, employer/slave, macho/homo, strong/weak, young/old, and so it goes, and goes and goes, unstoppable.  Both sides seek power and at least one side will kill to get it and justify the slaughter in the name of god, polis, fatherland, motherland, or "higher good."

We forget that the deeper issue isn't the abstract one of choosing peace over war, or cooperation over dominance.  Important as those choices are, a much more profound one involves the choice between creativity in the service of life, or creativity in the service of death.  Freud framed this choice in terms of Eros and Death -- in other words, will we succumb to a deep-seated death wish in which all is frozen and nothing ever changes, or will we choose the more difficult, subtle, mercurial, always changing, juicy, creative drive Freud called Eros?

.....Weapons: Arthur's magic sword is Excalibur.  Siegfried's is Balmung.  Roland's is Durendal.  Indra has his jarjara.  Zeus hurls lightning bolts.  Thor, a hammer.  Yahweh smites with plagues.  (See Weapons of Mythology & Folklore for more on Celtic & Teutonic data.) Other deities and heroes use trickery, magic lances, swords, knives, tridents, throwing-nets, daggers, clubs, and a bizarre assortment of other-worldly, lethal gear that makes them invisible, gives them great speed, or protects them from wounds.  We glamorize such weapons, hallow them, worship them, romanticize them, collect them in museums, make movies about them, and give them innocent names like "Little Boy" as we drop them over Hiroshima.
Lies:  The "other," which is to say, the "enemy," is always evil, demonic, inhuman, wicked, and guilty of unspeakable perversions, usually involving women and children.  "We," on the other hand, are always noble, proud, brave, blessed by our God(s), true, honorable, patriotic, straight-shooting, and protective of our women and children.

More lies: (1) it's possible to fight a war that will end all other wars;  (2) humans are inherently violent, Homo Necans, Man the Killer -- not Homo Ludens, Man the Playful, the "ludic."

....Conclusions: Mythology is full of wars and magic weapons -- they make for great epics, movies, and exciting storytelling (for example, see this interview with the director and screenwriter of the marvelous Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon).  They can be toxic, yes, and they desensitize us, but we could live with that if we could only keep them confined to the realm of imagination.  Too rigid a censorship, after all, has its own dangers.  Unfortunately, we let the wars and magic weapons swarm out into the real world, and such elements do not belong in the real world.  They simply don't translate well.  They solve nothing.  They only breed more wars and worse weapons.  People die.  Horror spreads.  No one's hands are clean.  War and violence are addictive, but because we're in culture-wide denial, we pretend that they're inevitable, a fact of life, programmed into our genes.  Violence continues to damage us -- worse, it damages our humanity.
As with any addiction, there's no simple solution.  Nurturing creativity and compassion in our populations, however, especially among our young, would be an important step.  Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz writes:

...demonism and creativity are psychologically very close to each other.  Nothing in the human psyche is more destructive than unrealized, unconscious creative impulses....[W]hen it is a question of a mass psychosis, nothing but new, creative, 'redemptive' archetypal conceptions, brought up from the depths, can stop the development toward a catastrophe.
                            [Projection & Re-collection in Jungian Psychology:106]
 

As von Franz makes clear, when our immense human creativity is thwarted, we feel dehumanized, we start dehumanizing others in revenge, and soon the cycle of "demonic," rabid violence erupts anew.  Then we truly get Wars, Weapons, and Lies: The Dehumanizing Impulse.

Will we consciously use our creativity in the service of fuller lives, or in the service of developing more technology for widespread, agonizing deaths?  Every addict faces a similar life and death choice.  Couldn't someone develop an innovative Alcoholics Anonymous-style "12 Step Program" for the many nations addicted to violence?  Buddhist meditation might also help such nations, especially the daily practice of sending out the vibration of loving-kindness to all species on earth.  Just accepting violence and war as addictive would significantly shift our values toward a greater respect for common sense and tolerance.  We need to do something, each in our way.  As the UNESCO charter states:

Since Wars Begin
In the Minds of Men,
It is in the Minds of Men
That we Have to Erect
The Ramparts of Peace.

If I may digress for a moment -- according to Jung, there are four functions, or psychological types.  My little chart below assumes that the primary function is thinking, but the same principles apply to each of the other three functions, although they'll manifest differently:
                  THINKING
                                |
       Sensate______|_____Intuitive
                                |
                                |
         Feeling (i.e., Valuing or "ethic-ing")

I'm over-simplifying here (and leaving out introverted and extroverted variables) but the basic idea is that one's strongest ability, or function, also has access to its two adjacent functions.   Thus, if a person (or a country -- most Western nations fall into this category) functions predominately as a thinking type, one also has access to the adjacent sensate and intuitive realms (bright green on my chart).

The function directly opposite, however, is one's blind spot (dull red on my chart) -- that's where both magic and "evil" will enter one's world because it's where one is most vulnerable.  That means that thinking types have great difficulty in applying ethics -- it's their blind spot.  In order to give a semblance of ethical behavior, they'll automatically default to sentimentality and platitudes.  In other words, they'll mouth patriotic and/or religious statements with great conviction ("God bless America!"; "Deutschland über alles!") and use these as substitutes for an authentic ethical stance.  They don't usually know they're doing this, of course:  they think they're being completely ethical.  That's the problem.

[For an excellent book on how all this works, I highly recommend Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, a Jungian analyst who studied with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff.  None of the four functions made any sense to me until I read de Castillejo's remarkable book many years ago.  Don't be fooled by her title -- it's really about humanity, not just women.  It was newly released in paperback by Shambhala in 1997. ]

If such knowledge stays at the level of intellect, we're lost.  What's needed is real work in activating the adjacent functions -- and for thinking types, that requires an exercise of somatic and intuitive imagination.  Scientists, especially, might explore this but so might the rest of us.

Again, I'm over-simplifying but, for example, suppose I'm a thinking-type scientist and I know that the poison gas I'm working on works best in a moisture-rich environment where it changes to hydrochloric acid and eats its way through everything in its path.  Lungs, of course, are a moisture-rich environment -- and lungs are what will breathe in that gas, which will become hydrochloric acid.  Such a death will be horrific.  I could dismiss such thoughts and keep on working -- which, in fact, is exactly what French scientists did in WWI when they developed phosgene gas (see Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon & Schuster, 1986; pp.93-95).

But if I know a little about Carl Jung and I want to take this further, I'll then move to my somatic (or body) imagination and imagine, or pretend, that I'm the person breathing in that gas.  I'll ask myself what's happening in my lungs when I do that.  I'll try to feel it physically, gut-level, and not in my brain alone.  I'll then add my intuitive imagination and ask myself how I react to that, what does my intuition tell me about this process going on in my lungs -- i.e., is it good for me or not?  At that point, since my lungs, intuition, and probably every cell in my body will be reacting in sheer horror, I hope I'll stop working on that gas and destroy my data.

If I'm so blocked and detached that I honestly can't feel the reaction of my own lungs and intuition, then I'll imagine that someone I love is breathing in that gas.  Again, my intellect will provide all the data that my two adjunct functions need and again I'll destroy my data. Not to exercise such imagination is part of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil" -- i.e., just doing one's job without ever connecting the dots, and then going home to a cosy glass of wine with one's mate.

What should be noted in these two scenarios is that I haven't gone near the ethical dimension -- if I'm a thinking type, I can't go there yet because it's my blind spot.  I've only enlisted the aid of my two adjunct functions, one dealing with what my body knows, the other consulting my intuition, or inner wisdom.  Regardless, I wind up acting ethically, but I get there indirectly by using those two adjuncts.

After much practice and work, according to Jung, one eventually begins to integrate that blind-spot function.  This process of individuation and union-of-opposites usually starts around midlife and finally leads to a fresh sense of wonder and renewal.  As that 4th function begins to open up, the little chart would start looking something like this:
                  THINKING
                                |
       Sensate______|_____Intuitive
                                |
                                |
         Feeling (i.e., Valuing or "ethic-ing")

Such work is vital for Western nations whose primary psychological type is left-brain thinking.  If they fail to grasp what they are really doing, such nations will remain arrogantly blind to genuine ethics, to "feeling" their way into the rightness or wrongness of a situation.  Not many people know, for example, that the Nazis sponsored the distribution of the Grimms' fairy tales to all German schoolchildren.  It was a time of nationalistic fervor and the Nazis considered the Grimms "quintessentially German" and "worthy standard-bearers for Germany at war" (see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, "The Publishing History of Grimms' Tales: Reception at the Cash Register," in The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase; Wayne State University Press, 1993:91-94).  This is typical behavior for thinking-type nations: whether they use flags, fairy tales, or television specials, rampant nationalism will justify all such misuse in the name of justice, ethics, good vs evil, us vs the "other."  In reality, what we call "evil" might more accurately be described as "damaged" -- damaged by our own vengeance, intolerance, and repression of the "other."

Immediately after WWII, from 1945-1949, British and US occupying forces stripped the Grimms' books from all of Germany's schools and libraries and shipped them to libraries elsewhere.  This was done because the Allies felt that those tales had desensitized the German public and thus bore a grave responsibility for Nazi horrors (see Bottigheimer, op.cit.).  With so many other pressing matters, it still amazes me to think that occupying forces were ordered to go out and confiscate fairy tales!  I can't imagine that the field of military history has anything else even remotely resembling that.  It indicates the immense power given, rightly or wrongly, to the influence of often violent stories upon a general populace, especially in the formative years of its young.

Simone Weil wrote during WWII that there is only one way out of the endless cycle of violence: we must "learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate."  Today, those millions of us who are trying either to explore the full behind-the-scenes stories, or to find alternate ways of handling conflict, are at the forefront in the creation of new myths, less toxic and bloody myths, myths that remind us of how wondrous and fragile we and all creation are.  Whether we know it consciously or not, we are mythmakers and storyweavers in the grand web of life.   We are trying to see through the wars, weapons, and lies to a more humane world, for we have deeply understood that it is finally time to stop demonizing, dehumanizing, and slaying dragons, by whatever name.

__________________________________________________________