But I remembered those archetypes, those energies, those masks. And I found them extremely useful to guide me through that Chaos. We all need guidance, we all need the Logos, the King, the ordering principle. The feminine in me wants me to flow, to allow, to let go. The masculine in me wants to order, to structure, to build. I think that both are valid. The Cards were created in the masculine Tower. The Stone was created in the feminine Cauldron.
As long as you don’t get attached, anything is fine.
As I read what I wrote above, I think I got into a paradoxical trap. I try to solidify things through Principles. For example, I made it a principle that “I must discard the cards”. Isn’t this a dogma disguised as freedom? I have the feeling that we can’t live without Principles. Naturally, we are just wired to create symbols that structure our reality. Otherwise, chaos would engulf us.
How, then, I interpret the recurrent symbols of the girl, the fairy, the goddess, that guards the Cauldron, so that I can burn my own stories, symbols and archetypes in it?
Ultimately, they are just that: symbols. They are tools that help you navigate this world, but they are just that, tools. You can use them, but be wary of becoming attached to them.
That’s the answer I get from her.
But what about him?
What about the energy behind the Ordering of the World?
He is a figure unknown to me. Very seldomly appears in my stories. In my stories there is a constant wandering, traveling, always going somewhere. But sometimes there is this force, this Builder, the Lord of the Castle and the Palace. He is not the magician, no. He is the Rebuilder of the Kingdom. The Return of the King to a ruined and forgotten Kingdom. He is tired of wandering, of traveling. He just wants the peace, the calm of the roots, the anchor.
This is the future’s King. He takes a land overtaken by the wild, by chaos, and tames it, and makes it fertile, ordered and beautiful. He rebuilds the run-down walls and establishes his own little Kingdom in the middle of nowhere, with his own flag and coat of arms. He trills and sows the fields, a new, long-awaited harvest. Then, he got cattle and other animals. And as his little Kingdom became prosperous, he befriended a shepherd. A poor, lonely shepherd that lived in a cave. And that shepherd knew the secret songs of the birds, of the trees, the winds and the lakes. People said he got mad, all alone all those years. But the King doesn’t judge. He saw the divine in him, the sacred in him. Slowly, the pariah of the land started flocking there. Blessed by the King, they worked harder than anybody else. The farmers trilled more fields, as the guards and warriors claimed the unclaimed, abandoned land. New walls. A forge, a blacksmith was needed, because as soon as the new Kingdom flourished, the surrounding kingdoms put an eye on it. And the King and his men defended it with bravery and the blood washed the young lands of the kingdom, and that blood gave rise to heroic stories. Inns, merchants, guilds. A city was born, the City of the Octagon. And the minstrels came, to sing the praise of the King.
This is the Man that gave me the symbols, the archetypes, those ordering principles.
But a King is nothing without a Queen. If the King is the ordering principle, the Queen is the weaver, the connector, the alliance maker. And so, when the Queen sees that Order becomes too rigid, she will destroy it, burn it to the ground, to remind the King that, ultimately, the Land is the True Ruler, and that he won’t survive if he keeps everything within walls. Chaos must penetrate the Kingdom. The Mysteries. The enraptured frenzy of the Mysteries at night, in the forest. The witch covenant, the druid and the magician. The true King is the pupil of the Magician, and the lover of the Goddess.
That’s why I got confused, so confused. I was only stirred by the Goddess, by the Queen. She would constantly burn what I hadn’t even built, and I didn’t even understand why. And this is because I didn’t let the King build his Kingdom, first. What is the use of the newly built Kingdom, if you just burn it to the ground the moment you just built it?