In 2004, James Hillman published a difficult and though-provoking investigation of war titled A Terrible Love of War. He writes:
“I believe that we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull […] To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart…”
In this episode, I approach Hillman and “A Terrible Love of War” with these questions:
What is “the terrible love of war?”
How does Hillman ask us to imagine it?
What can an archetypal perspective on the phenomenon of war tell us about its nature, and our own?
Can this perspective help us, as citizens and mortal humans, to create a culture of peace?
I welcome your comments and questions. Thanks for listening.
Transcript of A Terrible Love of War, a Culture of Peace
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Is war necessary?
Is war an activity that humans must engage in and will always engage in?
And if you don’t believe that, if you have questions about that, as I do, what do we do? How can we participate in the project of building a culture of peace?
These are the questions that I brought to James Hellman’s book, “A Terrible Love of War.” Today, I want to use that book as a support for my thoughts about a culture of peace in response to Hillman’s analysis.
War has been a central problem for human beings throughout recorded history. Somehow, often, for any number of reasons, and under a variety of circumstances, mortal humans, beings that know they can die, and will die, risk their precious life in an attempt to take it from other mortal beings.
Why does this happen? Over and over and over again? This is an important question for all of us to consider, particularly those of us who are not convinced that war must be the answer, that war must be a continual activity of our so-called civilizations. As Hillman observes, if the doves, that is the people who see themselves as proponents of peace, don’t take up this important task, then we’re basically leaving it to the hawks, to the people who do believe that war is necessary, and in many instances, inevitable.
This process of building a culture of peace, of even considering what that might look like, begins with imagination. Imagination is not a faculty that we choose to exercise when we want to do something creative. And imagination is not divorced from reality. It is our reality. It is through and by imagination, that we create our human reality, our concepts, our ideas, our stories. It is the source and the mirror of our psychology, of what we believe and feel, where we find meaning. And so, how we operate.
This is the basic premise of depth psychology.
James Hillman builds on this as a founder of archetypal psychology. In A Terrible Love of War, he considers the god, that is the archetype or psychological pattern of the phenomenon of war, who was known to the Greeks, as Aries, and to the Romans as Mars.
How this God appears in our myths, tells us something about this phenomenon, and how it operates in our psychology, and so, in our lives.
A Terrible Love of War is an extremely provocative book. I am not going to outline it in great detail. Rather, I’m going to share some select points and my response to them in an effort to suggest how each of us can participate in this task of imagining into war, in order to find ways to create a culture of peace. I will post a link to the book on my website, and also a link to a YouTube video of Hillman talking about the book.
Now, you may be thinking, well, war has been a primary topic, in societies around the world for millennia. So surely, we know as much as we need to about this phenomenon. And it’s certainly true that we collect facts, we document wars, in words and images, we construct histories around them, we have developed a vocabulary to describe the impact of war on societies on the earth, on the human body, and spirit. And yet, we have not according to Hillman, looked deeply, that is imagined deeply, into the phenomenon itself, to consider it as a pattern in the psyche, as something that happens to us as much as it is something that we do.
He begins by suggesting that there are some real obstacles to imagining war in the phenomenon itself. First of all, he says that it is war is both normal and inhuman at the same time, and in the face of this contradiction, we check out. We psychologically fall asleep, we don’t enter into that space, because we can’t hold the tension between these two poles.
He also says that there is a love in us for war and that we resist admitting this, let alone trying to understand it. Hillman singles Americans out, in particular. Americans, because our culture is a culture that is addicted to innocence, to not knowing and avoiding the consequences, avoiding the reality of our past and our true nature as a country.
Hillman also says that there is a love in war, this terrible love of war because mythologically Aries is paired with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. This pairing he suggests, is more than a contrast, it’s more than the opposites of love and war. Their coupling suggests that they are somehow found in each other.
Now, I want to share some bits from the book to amplify these three points, the notion that war is normal, that it is inhuman, and that there is a love in it. In the book, he calls this the sublimity of war. So first, his claim that war is normal. This statement is not a defense of war. It is not a denial of the brutality, the devastation, the cruel and pathological behaviors, the suffering and death.
War is acceptable, so it is constant and ubiquitous, and it has been normalized. For example, as of 2004, when this book was published, Hillman notes that in the 5600 years of written human history 14,600 wars have been recorded.Two point something wars a year that have been recorded.
He provides this catalogue of wars, fought since 1975. And this is a list he put together in 2004, which was incomplete at the time and has since expanded. I have to read this to you because I was astonished when I read this and thought about it. Here’s the list:
Haiti, Grenada, the Falklands, Peru, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Eritrea, Chad, Mauritania, Somalia, Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Cambodia, East Timor, Sumatra, Irian, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Ireland, Chechnya, Georgia, Romania, Basque Spain. And of course, we can add others to this list.
He also points to the fact that wars are the central stories in our most elevated works of thought. He provides the example of Hindu and platonic philosophy, where he writes: “a warrior class is imagined as necessary to the wellbeing of humankind. This class finds its counterpart within human nature as virtues of courage, nobility, honor, loyalty, steadfastness of principle, comradely love, so that war is given location, not only as a class of persons, but in a level of human personality organically necessary to the justice of the whole.”
Organically necessary to the justice of the whole. That’s important, I think, and I’m going to come back to that. He notes that of course, war is embedded in our myths, that we also see as religions. We have the Biblical god Yahweh, most certainly a warrior’s god. And in Christianity and Islam, God’s soldiers fighting God’s wars with God on their side.
And when we have a monotheism, only one God, and this God is a God that urges war upon us, then we have what Hillman calls “a God that presents as the absolute truth of the cosmos,.” To state the obvious, the history of monotheism, like Christianity, is a history of war.
Further, the use of the language of war, and talk of waging war is woven into the every day, and brought to a growing number of situations. We’re used to hearing about the “war” on cancer, poverty, against drugs; the information war, the gender war, trade wars, although none of these have anything to do, as Hillman observes, with the actualities of war. These are noble wars, without a violent, death dealing combat, and calling them “wars” dilutes our understanding of the real thing, and normalizes it.
Of course, there are people who believe that war is inevitable, and many more who believe that war is justified in certain situations, or against certain enemies, I have a hard time extricating myself from that position, which is one of the reasons that I read this book and am sharing this podcast with you.
And finally, the definition of peace is the absence of war. That is, war is assumed to be the basic condition, and peace is a temporary cessation of that activity. Peace is a pause between wars.
So, war is normal. And as I say, I’m not unpacking all of his arguments in the book. At the same time, war is inhuman. We can begin with the fact that we have mortal beings deliberately risking their lives and killing other human beings.
Then there is the scale of the destruction. The sheer numbers, the magnitude of it. The incredible pollution of the Earth, the mutilations and the genocide, the rapes… Hillman says the inhuman potential can be summarily grouped into three kinds: “the disfiguring of the human frame, that is the body, the soul and societal structures, deranged behaviors, and inhuman weaponry, the accoutrements and symbolic abstractions, the hyper rationalism of its instruments.”
We reduce war to facts and statistics and numbers. The thinking about war is impersonal and the mind of war is abstract. It’s all about acronyms and signs and symbols, and euphemisms that remove us from the reality of it, you know, war as a game, and the ruthless instruments as toys, and battlefields, as theatres.
So to introduce the god Aries into this, Aries, or as the Romans called him, Mars, is the god of iron, the iron of weapons and machines, and of the will. Hillman asks us to consider metal under stress, metal fatigue, and relate that to the high incidence of psychiatric breakdown in war. I was astonished by the statistics that he shared, that reveal that there are three or four or five times more psychiatric casualties in the wars in which they have been recorded, then deaths.
War is a type of machine, which is not a place for the human being. We are not meant to be cogs in machines.
Now, if we know the phenomenon of war through the way that it has been personified, through the way that the pattern reveals itself in our myths, and specifically, the god of war, Aries, then we find yet another dimension of this inhumanity, which is the behavior that the god compels in those who are caught up in that archetypal energy. The “seeing red,” the being completely fearless, and so entering into a state where one experiences oneself as being immortal, and what the Norse called “going berserk,” battle rage.
Aries or Mars, is a god who is known through action. He is the action, and he is the way we are acted upon and the way that we act. So for example, some of the epithets or descriptive attributes which you might call the nicknames that the Greeks and the Romans had, for Aries and Mars, are blind, raging, wild, untameable, excessive, insane, bloody, swift, sudden, wanton, foul, obscene, unarticulated, savage, archaic, ancient killer of man, fatal to mortals, destroyer, supernaturally powerful, audacious, fierce passion.
Which brings me to the final, and in many ways, most essential dimension of war as the inhuman for our purposes of imagining, which is the autonomy of the energy, its archetypal nature. The Greeks and the Romans experienced it as something that happened to them, and this is true of all of their gods. It’s one of the reasons why the Greek pantheon is such an interesting vocabulary of our psychology, so to speak. And this is something that we’ve largely lost, as we developed our sense of our “selves” as private selves with an interior that is somehow insulated from the outside world and from outside forces.
But we are not. We are deeply embedded in the material world and in psyche. We are part of the whole thing. We are not little isolated pieces bouncing around, you know, in some empty space. So, war itself, the god, generates its own momentum. It comes in to us, it is autonomous and because it brings the energy of death and the imperative to kill, to kill other human beings, it is inhuman.
Now, there are other people who have talked about the autonomy of war and how important it is for us to grasp this, who are not archetypal psychologists and do not use that language. Two examples from Hillman’s book. One is Tolstoy, who’s War and Peace is one of the best books ever written about war as a human experience. Tolstoy wrote that none of these causes, that is nothing that we, none of the stories that we tell about war, is why wars happen. None of these causes account for war. “Over and above is some unnamed force, not unlike that of living beings.”
In her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that we have been misled and we continue to mislead ourselves, by attempting to pin wars on to persons, economics, or gender, by trying to create explanations of wars as things that were necessary because of this, or that happened because certain people or person did this. She writes “It is the autonomy of war as an institution that we have to confront, and explain.”
So, we have this inhuman power, like the inhuman powers of nature, and fate. And the question is, can we understand the phenomenon by seeing what it shows us about itself, and through imagination, invent ways of dealing with it, of slowing it down, containing it, limiting its activity? That’s as far as Hillman thinks we can go, but I wonder if we might also, in the construction of a culture of peace, go further.
This brings us to our final piece, the terrible love of war, the love of war, the love in war, the love through war. Hillman writes, “I believe that we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament, unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull […] It is a principle of the psychological method, that any phenomenon to be understood must be empathetically imagined. To know war, we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart…”
To do this, we have to turn to the myths of Aries, the myths of the god of war, and there are very few. The Greeks don’t tell a lot of myths about Aries. What we know is that he was hated even by the gods. Zeus despised him. Aries was a son of Zeus, but not technically. He actually was brought forth independently, kind of a virgin birth, by the Goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus. She did this out of anger at Zeus’s many infidelities.
We think of war as the province of men, as the activity of men and as something to which men are particularly susceptible. And yet I wonder how much of this is a function of our gender constructions, and the burdens that we have placed upon each other, as male and female. For the myth suggests that the “martial soul” as Hillman calls it, is as much female as it is male.
Now, the most famous myth about Aries, really the about the only myth about Aries, links him to the goddess of love, Aphrodite. In this myth, Aphrodite, who is married to the god of craft Hephaestus, has an affair with Aries. Hephaestus finds out about this and wants to humiliate the couple. He crafts a very, very fine chain, so fine that it can’t be seen, and he positions it over his marital bed. Then he tells Aphrodite that he is going to go and visit a friend. He leaves. Aries and Aphrodite meet. There they are in bed making love. The chain falls on them as Hephaestus has planned and he comes back and catches them together.
They are pinned to the bed. They can’t move, and the other gods and goddesses are called to witness this transgression. We’re told that the goddesses out of modesty and delicacy, decide not to go and take a look. The gods however do, and they have a range of reactions, none of which fully sanction or absorb the fact that these two are together.
As Hillman observes, we tend to behave like the gods. We see this coupling of Love and War as grossly inappropriate. This takes a couple of forms. One is that we see the two in opposition. We see them as alternatives to each other, make love not war. And we don’t accept the possibility that there is meaning beyond this, in the union.
However, there are a lot of similarities between love and war. These are both extraordinarily passionate activities. They are instances in which we have a loss of self-control, in which our usual sense of identity is dissolved and also expanded. There is a visceral, bodily feeling of power, a kind of power that floods you with the sense that you are being connected to something larger, and the body’s involvement in this is central.
Now, because we see Love and War as opposite ends of the pole, we miss an opportunity to find, well, if not a solution to the problem of war, then perhaps a way to enter it through our imagining, to then construct ways of dealing with Aries that are more in line with his partner, Aphrodite. It is a principle of these archetypal patterns that they contain within themselves many seeds of response, so when you are in an archetypal pattern and you encounter a problem, if it challenges you in some way, the archetype itself suggests a way out.
We live in a culture in which Aphrodite has been denied, repressed, and trivialized. Now, Aphrodite in brief, is the goddess of love, of beauty, of sexuality, that is of the erotic. And she is the goddess of relatedness, of Eros. She’s the mother of Eros. And she is then, the goddess of the particular. She is not the goddess not of agape, of love for the masses, love in the abstract. She is the goddess of love, of relatedness, to a particular one.
This is where I want to begin my reflections on the possibilities of creating a culture of peace, of what that might mean. I want to return first to Hillman’s observation about our definition of “peace” as merely being the absence of war. He goes on to say, “if peace is merely an absence of, a freedom from, it is both an emptiness and a repression. A psychologist must ask how is this emptiness filled, since nature abhors a vacuum; and how does the repressed return as it must?
We begin with this image of peace as being somehow kind of empty and bland. And the first thing I want to suggest is that we can become ambassadors of the Aphroditic, we can live more fully the archetype of Aphrodite, of the goddess of love. Each of the things that I said about her, the beauty, the erotic, the relatedness, the particular, are topics in and of themselves. I’m going to satisfy myself with making only a couple of points.
In terms of beauty, we have many options: appreciating beauty, finding beauty, and beauty is found in the particular, right? It is by looking at something specific, that we perceive to be beautiful. We can create beauty, we can make something beautiful, we can create beautiful things. We can also elicit the beauty in something, or someone, and we can share this. We can share this experience of beauty.
It takes a lot of courage to do this in a world that trivializes the beautiful and that insists that beauty is something superficial, and that beauty is a commodity.
We can also become ambassadors of the Aphroditic by deepening our appreciation of the particular. I’m thinking about this in terms of other human beings. Many of us have an unmet need that is very deeply felt, to be truly seen. To be truly seen. When I walk around in the world, I notice how infrequently we really look into each other’s eyes. This can be a very fleeting moment, the moment of seeing and being seen. And yet what can it offer us, I wonder?
There is an extension of this, that other people like William Stafford, who was a poet and a pacifist, (and I’m going to return to him later), have experimented with, which is to take this notion of seeing and imagination as empathy, and imagine our ways into the hearts and minds and lives of the so called enemy. To see ourselves even, through their eyes. If we were able to do this, how would this change our experience? Would we discover the common ground of our humanity?
So, one possibility in the creation of a culture of peace, is to revive and more fully live the archetype of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
Another is to find ways to propitiate, that is respect and honor and recognize, the God of War in peacetime. Because when we have this definition of peace as being the absence of war, we are relegating what is actually a very common phenomenon in life to the outskirts. We are banishing it. Right now, we mostly go back to our other activities, we resume our normal life ignoring the fact that war is normal. And we do this, if we have even allowed the presence of war to interrupt us at all.
However, we can live with war, not as something that is over or past, but as an active presence in the psyche. And we can do this without enacting it, without entering into the energy of Aries, through cultural rites. Cultural rites that acknowledge this presence and link our actions to contain and limit it, somehow, to that power. Right now, we have war memorials and holidays of remembrance, holidays of remembrance that are attended with a growing lack of interest on the part of many of us. These focus on the dead and on memory, on what we think is past. Memory has not proven to be an effective deterrent to war.
And further, our definition of peace, and our form of memorializing war, does not create a space for those living among us, who have directly experienced it. They know things that we need to know to further our imagining, and this project of building a culture of peace. And yet our expectation is that they will be rehabilitated back into peace time without our learning much of anything about the depths of their experience.
In his description of the experience of our war veterans Hillman writes, “I have been mothballed by peace, peace time has no time for my awareness. “And if you are familiar in any way, with the experience of our veterans, you know that we do not create a place for them. We do not create a place for what they’ve experienced, we do not create a place for what they have learned and what they could tell us. And we do not create a place for them in our societies, period. They are left by and large to navigate the gap between war and peace as it has been defined, on their own.
Which leads me to another suggestion about how we might enter into the love of war and build a culture of peace. We might honor the motivations and the human qualities that belong to the war experience as essential and meaningful, and redirect them.Motivations, for example, like the call to preserve and protect, to eradicate an evil, to test yourself, to prove yourself, to be in service to something larger, for the intensity and the aliveness, for the unity and the sense of belonging. Now there are some people who are sadists in search of an opportunity to express that. I’m not suggesting that we make space for that. But these are honorable motivations.
And then there are the qualities of the warrior. I mentioned some of those earlier in the bit that I read from Hillman. Things like courage, loyalty, discipline, strength, heroic service. Where are these in peacetime? To what use are they put out in peacetime? I look around and I say well, our collective effort is primarily to be part of yet another machine, the machine of the economy, where we’re called to bring the best that we have, and put it in service to the ego of the CEO, to the quest for livelihood, and this thing we call the economy, which we have turned into a god.
Otherwise, our experience of these qualities in ourselves is personal, and private.
What if we made it a collective project to ask this of each other, to ask each other for courage, and loyalty and strength of principle, in pursuit of goals that fed our souls, as well as our bodies?
I’ve suggested that we become ambassadors for the Aphroditic. That we create cultural rites that propriate the god of War as an active presence, and that we honor and redirect the motivations and human qualities that are part of the war experience. I have one final suggestion, which is that each of us actively and imaginatively engage in the shared project of culture building.
In the United States and other places around the world, there is a culture “war” underway. Arguments about who we are and how we should talk about ourselves, and what’s important. And these all matter, and come with consequences. But can we look more deeply into what is lacking?
What do we mean by “the system,” for example? Can we take our insights seriously enough, to act upon them?
I find myself thinking about “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. In this poem, he writes,
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Sounds like a good description of our current situation.
Can we create together a culture that is worth defending against war’s destruction, that even makes actual war less necessary? Can we make this shared project one that attracts and satisfies us?
Many of us live in worlds, live in societies, that are viewed– that is imagined –as machines, with each “thing” a resource, a commodity. In this machine we are cogs, replaceable parts and brands. And in our free time, we are encouraged to be spectators and consumers.
It’s empty.
As Jung said, modern societies are by and large, banal, and people live unsatisfying lives in which everything is “nothing but” and “merely.” This is the consequence of our one-sided consciousness and is emblematic of our disconnection from soul, from imagination and from our depths. So we distract. We engage in a constant quest for sensation, titillation and excitement.
There is a cultural vacuum that Mars, Aries, war can fill. Can we fill it with something more satisfying, something that gives us a sense of purpose and belonging to the world and to each other, and that satisfies all of our human needs?
If we use the language of the machine, if we go through the motions of it, we perpetuate it.
Cultures built around the image of the inhuman machine will not become cultures of peace. Can we see each other and the world through the eyes of love and find a unifying image for our cultures with heart?
The next podcast –shifting gears here– will be on April 7th. April is National Poetry Month here in the United States and the April podcast episodes will be devoted to poetry.
Poetry is an important part of culture. And our oldest known myths were written first as poems. Poetry continues to be an important portal into the metaphorical perspective, and life with soul.
I invite you to email me a poem that speaks to you for inclusion in these podcasts. Let us come together in this space to share some poetry. I want to go back to William Stafford, the poet and pacifist I mentioned earlier, for some further context about these poetry podcasts. William Stafford’s son, Kim Stafford, published a collection of his father’s poetry and interviews with him, and some of William Stafford’s journal entries. It’s called Every War has Two Losers. I found this poem there. It’s titled, “A Gesture Toward an Unfound Renaissance.”
“A Gesture Toward An Unfound Renaissance”
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face–
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
And you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains, where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
In a bit of commentary about this poem, Stafford writes:
“This purposeful wandering that we represent, the arts, is turning away from the rigorously planned and effective procedure that has made us be in control of things–today, this essential play feels more important than ever.
By shunning our feelings, by postponing the results of our actions till research is completed, and then by applying stern technique to machines or weapons— this science and technology life has wrapped us in ease and security. But our human feelings are deprived. We hardly dare consider at length what manner of life we have accepted in order to maintain our control over things. The weapons poised over our heads and the industry that supplies our needs– these have a cost that our escape into art helps us to live with. And we do possess means to carry us into salvation at intervals and beyond.”
Before we part ways, I wanted to give a big welcome to new subscribers Sean, Kim, Karen, Greg, Amy, Angela, Nina, Tony, Katherine, Bridget, Mike, Barry, Colette, Janet, Leslie, Marina, Brian, Keith. Thank you so much for subscribing for email announcements about Myth Matters and my other programs.
On that note, other programs, I am accepting new clients into Psyche’s Logos, Mentorship in a Life with Soul. Psyche’s Logos is a series of 60-minute conversations with me, with ongoing practices and experiments to guide you into a life with soul. This is a private process designed to meet the needs of your unique situation. If this sounds intriguing, head over to the Mythic Mojo website for details.
Many thanks to the patrons and supporters of this podcast whose financial contributions keep it all going. In particular, thank you to my current patrons, Barbara and Jacqui. Your support of Myth Matters makes a huge difference for me. Thank you so much for your support.
And that’s it for me. Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. I encourage you to please send me a poem for the April podcast. And as always, keep the mystery in your life alive.
Link to A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman
Link to Hillman talking about A Terrible Love of War on YouTube
Link to Every War has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
