Hypnotherapy in Excalibur: Chapter 2 Part 7 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
EXCALIBUR (1981)
Inspired partly by Jungian theory, Excalibur illustrates how cinema can do
much of the therapy as well as of the hypnotic induction. As preparation for it,
John Boorman read psychology. He associates the Pendragon “Dragon” with Freud’s id
and Jung’s collective unconscious, seeing it as a dangerous but necessary step in
the development of identity. Boorman comments, “The dragon is the prehistoric creature,
the reptile, in all of us, the id rising out of the depths of the swamp, with all
the terror which that supposes. For Jung, in effect, the unconscious has to be confronted,
since it represents the past of both the individual and the race. But traveling through
the unconscious is a terrifying enterprise and may end with the destruction of the
ego. The Middle Ages, according to Jung, was a period, which like the unconscious,
we ought to study in order to gain a better understanding of ourselves” (Ciment 188).
When an image has two contrasting parts, signifying the normal versus the Other,
the latter often images the unconscious; thus, in civilization/nature, modern/medieval,
mamalian/serpentine, actual/fantastic, the second term may connote the psychological
depths. Boorman’s “dragon” combines all of them.
And the blade Excalibur probes all of them. According to Merlin, this “Sword of Power” was “forged when the world was young; and bird, beast, and flower were one with man; and death was but a dream.” This is the state of the pre-logical unconscious and of the movie’s world. Excalibur thrust angrily through the earth (i.e., the “Dragon”) emerges miles away to pierce Merlin himself. To use the Dragon’s power, he becomes one with its (super)natural cycles–as the movie’s excessive repetitions of oneric images gradually daze the audience into its dreamtime. But it is no longer enough: the movie evokes a period when an orderly stage-four civilization is replacing the superstitions of stage two and the violence of stage three–both levels lumped together as paganism giving way to Christianity.
Excalibur’s emphasis on the connection between nature and magic testifies to Boorman’s research into comparative religions. Jessie’s Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, one of the movie’s major sources, argues that the Grail legends arose from initiation rituals of a pagan fertility cult. Even the staunchly Christian medievalist, C. S. Lewis, whose views differ otherwise from Weston’s, has the character Merlin in his novel That Hideous Strength, originally derive power from nature spirits.
In Excalibur, Merlin is a priest of the “Dragon,” this collective
unconscious tying human beings to one another and to nature. Merlin tells Arthur
that the Dragon is all around them when they are in a wilderness with a large serpent
and a thunderstorm. To confront Morgana with “the face of the Dragon,” Merlin takes
her away from man-made Camelot into a cavern (the underworld being another stock
image of the unconscious). No dragon’s face appears within the crystal walls, only
a vision of love-making in a forest: a synecdoche of nature. The movie shows the
Pendragon emblem of Arthur and his father Uther as a dragon, recalling one of the
many associations of that creature: a fertility symbol. Actually, the “dragon” of
the family title may simply mean “leader” (Minary and Moorman 111). Boorman makes
this godlike spirit of nature a union of opposites or coincidentia oppositorum,
to use Jung’s favorite phrase for the unconscious. In dialogue between Merlin and
Morgana, the following is said of a cavern called “the coils of the Dragon”: “Here
all things are possible, and all things meet their opposites....the future and the
past .... desire and regret”–.
“One Land, One King”
Repetitions permeate Excalibur’s from the first words of dialogue:
| Merlin: Uther! Uther: Merlin! Merlin: Uther! Uther: Merlin! |
During this scene so-misty that the first two nights of filming left no recognizable images on the film, knights appear bewilderingly similar in their armor. It sets the oneiric mood for much of movie, shot through clouds of smoke, fog, or blowing snow.
After Merlin brings peace to the battling knights in a highly ritualized scene, the duke of Cornwall’s scantily clad wife Ygrain (played by Boorman’s daughter) dances to a tune that grows louder as knights beat time to it and Uther sways to its pulse. Uther demands her and war recommences, but Merlin influences events by chanting over and over an incantation in Old Irish: “anal nathrak, uthvas bethud, do che-ol di-enve.” As he recites this “charm of making” (invoking the breath of the serpent) Uther almost immediately falls into sleep or trance and dreams of “the Dragon” (the film’s term for a fertility magic extending throughout nature). “Held up by [his] lust,” Uther rides upon the fog-covered sea..
Just as in dreams, the erotic and violent often intertwine. While
Uther gallops on the waves to Ygrain, the real Duke rides across the drawbridge toward
battle. At Merlin’s command “Change! Transform!” Uther becomes indistinguishable
from the Duke. Closeups accentuate the rise and fall of the identical riders. In
the soundtrack, rhythmical, dissonant chords underscore the sound of hooves. Uther
brushes past the Duke’s twin hounds, who growl menacingly, but do not attack. Overpowered
with desire, Uther does not wait to take off all his armor, but seizes Ygrain, as
soon as his loins are unclothed. The audience continues to see the men as identical
of face and both at least partly in armor. Overpowered with battle fury, the real
Duke charges his foes. Merlin’s familiars–two, identical ravens–startle the Duke’s
stallion. Just when Uther sexually penetrates the wife, the fallen and impaled husband
dies. His last groans synchronize with the heavy breathing of intercourse. And Morgana
foresees the key events in her vision.
.
Double Initiations
The above example attains its entrancing quality not merely from repetition but even
more through pervasive eroticism–since the sensual almost automatically evokes libido
if consciousness does not manage to repress it immediately. Another means of this
is archetypal imagery, including the seven archetypes included in the preceding chapter,
but also others from universal experiences, such as “initiation” (Jung and von Franz128)–
an image of moving from stage to stage. With a Bolero-like melody pounding in the
background, Arthur, after recovering Uther’s sword from next to a sleeping monk,
runs to initiations. Lost in the bewildering forest, he finds Merlin asleep, so that
Arthur is temporarily on his own. As in the 1963 cartoon Sword in the Stone
(based on T. H. White’s classic of the same name), massive anxiety overpowers Arthur
after his winning Excalibur. The first trial consists of his turning the energy of
this neurotic panic inward in a transformation from complacent acceptance of his
familial situation (stages two) to becoming the head of hierarchy (stage three).
Amidst darkness, eerie sounds, centipedes and serpents, a lightning bolt narrowly
misses him. Taking advantage of the boy’s confusion, Merlin rouses and hypnotizes
him. Through that trance, the sorcerer instructs Arthur in the lore of the “Dragon,”
including the magical interconnection of king and country. This mytholigied version
of rapport comes directly from Weston’s book: “The condition of the King is sympathetically
reflected on the land, the loss of virility in the one brings about a suspension
of the reproductive processes of Nature in the other” (Weston 23). He (and through
him the audience) is being told to identify with the microcosm of Nature within:
the unconscious. Merlin also warns him not to be like Uther who never learned “to
look into men’s hearts, least of all his own”: thus, Arthur and the audience are
being trained to look within.
As Merlin and Arthur walk and talk together through the labyrinthine forest, they find themselves back among Arthur’s supporters. The rhythms of Carmina Burana reverberate, and Arthur leads his men against Sir Urien, who would deny the boy’s newly revealed identity, son and heir of Uther. When, in the midst of a stream, Urien remarks that Arthur is not yet even a knight, the lad kneels and asks his foe to knight him. This ceremony in a stream resembles baptism, the paradigmatic Christian initiation, and the knighting is done “In the name of God, of St. Michael, and of St. George.”
This liturgical dedication highlights the enmity between Christianity
(stage four) and Merlin’s “Dragon” faith, since St. Michael and St. George are the
great dragon fighters of medieval legend, while God’s chief enemy is the apocalyptic
dragon Satan, yet Arthur is expected to jump two stages in one day. Having made only
nominal protress, he feels no need to renounce one stage for the other. The period
ascribed to Arthur (sixth century C.E.) really mingled the two stages/faiths (making
it an analog of present ecumenism). Almost every version of Arthur’s saga comes to
terms with this condition, for the presence of Merlin, a sorcerer, in Christian Camelot
implies a period resolving divided identity and thus a model of psychological integration.
Foreshadowings
Hardly a single subsequent encounter lacks pagan/Christian tension. Swaying to the
medieval rhythms, Guinevere demurely dances, attracting Arthur–perhaps contrasting
with an earlier, more frenetic and pagan sequence, where Uther succumbed to lust
for Ygrain. Nonetheless, despite the rustic Christian atmosphere of the second dance
scene, Guinevere gives Arthur a cake with “secret ingredients”–a relic of the old
nature magic. Merlin foresees that this love, like the earlier one, will bring destruction,
with the Queen breaking her Christian vows of marriage.
Her future lover, Lancelot, arrives in shining armor, confronting the dull, pewter-colored arms of Arthur and his knights. Testing all he meets “under the eyes of God,” Lancelot begins as a saintly Christian, as in the musical and film Camelot. There, however, his idealism simply contrasts with his later fall into sin. In Excalibur, it makes him the chief embodiment of exclusive devotion to Christian idealism (most obviously later, when he becomes a fanatical, indeed, violently insane monk). When he dies, Arthur describes him as “what is best in men,” by which seems to be meant, a personification of stage-four order.
In a duel, unable to conquer Lancelot by fair means, Arthur calls on the magic of Excalibur and wins, but the blade snaps. Swinging temporarily from a stage-three to a stage-four orientation, the King admits that his temper and pride have misled him and throws the sword into the water. Then, the Lady of the Lake (played by another of Boorman’s daughters) surfaces with the weapon intact. As anyone familiar with the original stories will recognize, this conflates tales of three different legendary blades: the sword in the stone, one from the lake, and a grail sword that was magically reforged. As Malory and Caxton made the vast body of Arthuriana manageable by reducing the number of named characters and objects, so Excalibur consolidates even further. Each such condensation increases the number of repetitions by decreasing the stock of images at play. Therefore, with Excalibur the film’s only named sword, key encounters feature it, concentrating the action.
With an army gathered in a circle around him, Merlin, his staff
blazing, speaks at the founding of Camelot. He warns, “it is the doom of men that
they forget.” Salvation requires spiritual repetition, remembering the emblems of
diversity united. These forgotten, even for a moment, potentially uniting love may
turn selfish and wreck the kingdom. As with the Round Table or the army ringed around
Merlin or his later manifestation at Stonehenge, one of the chief of these emblems
is the circle, the simplest geometric version of repetition (infinitely returning
into itself), a common– Jung says “archetypal”–symbol of unification (see Whitlark
1991, 206). At his first sight of the round table, Percival exclaims, “I must be
dreaming,” a reminder to the audience that the scene is a psychological pattern brought
into manifestation.
“many cups to drink from”
At Arthur’s nuptials, Merlin has moved to the periphery. The central circle is now
the chalice of a high nuptial mass. Being pagan, Merlin cannot partake nor can Morgana,
who reveals herself to him as “a creature like you.” While the ecclesiastical chant
“Kyrie eleison” echoes in the background, these pre-Christians talk of the old religion
that is passing away: “The one god comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits
of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. Yes, it’s a time for men
and their ways.”
The transition is precarious, easily susceptible to corruption. With two dogs behind him (recalling the two ravens of earlier scenes), Merlin warns of hidden evil, but his magic is insufficient to halt it (as Excalibur itself had snapped against a symbol of the new, more-conscious order). This time what fails is the less conscious side of kingship–the queen, charged with adultery.
Lancelot has difficulty aiding her, because of a vision. After he prays that God deliver him from himself, he lies sleeping when, in a dream or otherwise, his armor attacks him. “I fight against myself,” he cries, and, presumably waking, he pulls his sword from his hip (a common metonymy for the groin). The resulting lesion, like his adulterous passion, never heals, and eventually kills him, because, conscious stage four personified, he cannot accept his Shadow.
According to a psychological study by Robert Rogers “doubling in
literature usually symbolizes a dysfunctional attempt to cope with mental conflict.”
Lancelot struggles unsuccessfully with his concupiscence. Less transparently allegorical,
the battle between Uther’s kingly honor and his lust for another man’s wife ends
with him abandoning his own normal appearance and metamorphosing into that of the
other man. Arthur’s later wound (a metaphor for his feelings about Guinevere’s treachery)
results from another enchantment: Morgana becomes the double of that queen in order
to seduce her half-brother, who, at least consciously, wishes to stay loyal to Guinevere
and his faith. Here again, the Doppelgänger motif emphasizes mental conflict
between sexual nature (repressed in the Shadow) and stage-four Christian ideals.
The repeated doubling and repetition itself become associated with (and thus evokes)
the primitive depths, where identity has not risen to the clarity of consciousness.
Brotherly Love
Since Arthur intended no evil, from a Christian point of view, despite his subsequent
sense of guilt, he did not sin. Actions, however, are seen from both pre-Christian
and Christian perspectives. According to the former, the magical act will have magical
consequences. As Merlin previously explained, the land is slowly shifting from the
old dispensation (fertility cult), to the Christian one. Merlin intends to accept
this change, but, when Excalibur is lost, he becomes disoriented and slips into a
trance, which Morgana manipulates to learn the spell of making. They both repeat
it in a contest of wills; she wins, leaving him frozen within the Dragon.
Reactionary inertia personified, she wants to resist the coming of the God made Flesh
(Christ) by giving birth to a “god” herself. As Jung often noted, practitioners of
incest sometimes have delusions of divine power, because breaking a fundamental taboo
makes them feel as if they were beyond the human condition–or, at least conscioius
morallity. In ancient times, many dynasties (most notably the Egyptian) both claimed
divine descent and preserved the “purity” of their blood-line through incest. The
gods of most mythologies committed it, frequently. When the child of incest is born,
Arthur is at Christian mass, but this does not protect him against nature magic,
which, being grounded far below the mental surface, is consistently more powerful
than the newer faith.
In a montage, two parallel ceremonies occur. A priest raises the consecrated chalice–Christ’s blood worshipped as a divine epiphany. Morgana’s “divine” son is raised for similar purposes. Lightning sears through a stained glass window, electrifying Arthur’s groin. Since “the King and the land are one,” the country also suffers infertility.
Later, just before losing consciousness, Arthur commands a search for the Holy Grail to heal ruler and realm. In the earliest legends, the word “grail” meant not a chalice but a shallow dish and it probably had nothing to do with Christianity. The Grail of Medieval Romances was at first a magical, food—bestowing vessel, for the medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach a “stone,” later the chalice containing Christ’s blood, and after that, a name for the Earthly Paradise, a dance, and even a euphemism for sexual intercourse (Waite 289). Following Weston, the movie associates it with the fertility-cult belief in sympathetic magic connecting king and country, so the grail conjoins pagan and Christian, unconscious Nature and newly rising consciousness, thereby promising healing--eventually.
Meanwhile, in golden armor, Mordred (played by Boorman’s son) lures Arthur’s knights to their deaths. One after another succumbs to various martyrdoms. Some hang from boughs, an oblique allusion not to Christ’s Cross directly but to Frazer’s Golden Bough, which implies that hanging and crucifixion borrow imagery of fertility tree cults. Urien dies in the water, recalling the earlier scene where he knighted Arthur there. The deaths are inflicted by identical, robotlike suits of armor (the doubling motif here associated with the division and conflict in the country’s governance).
After ten years, only Perceval remains loyal to the search. Starting
to drown, he divests himself of the possessions that weight him down and is either
magically transported to the Grail castle or, more probably, dreams this. He sees
Arthur there (whereas Arthur is physically in Camelot, sitting barely conscious on
his throne. Still dripping from his baptismal plunge and renewal, Perceval is next
shown beside the physical Arthur, though, since Arthur’s steward does not seem to
be able to glimpse Perceval, the latter is probably only there in Arthur’s mind.
It is thus therein that Arthur drinks from the Grail and recalls the Dragon (i.e.,
the unconscious as a microcosm of nature); he is healed thereby. The long-barren
land breaks into blossom. Particularly after its visionary prelude, this healing
is in the hypnotic sense a “suggestion,” teaching that change of mind can renew the
world.
Once and Future King
Arthur tells Guenivere: “The fellowship was a fair time that cannot be forgotten.
And because it was not forgotten, it will come again.” This sounds very like a suggestion
to the audience as well. They are being told to take the fantasy seriously since
dreams are real, as Merlin demonstrates. He appears, saying:
| “Your love brought me back in the land of dreams.” “Are you just a dream?” asks Arthur. “A dream to some, a nightmare to others,” the sorcerer replies. Sir Kai has the same vision. |
In a climactic use of dream suggestion, Merlin enters the sleeping mind of Morgana. Appealing to her vanity, he leads her to re-chant the charm of making, thereby evoking a mist. Exhausted by the process, she loses her magically sustained beauty. Horrified, Mordred (whose tie with her seems incestuous) strangles her–punishment for her hanging the knights. To the strains of Carmina Burana, Arthur, finally rejoined by Lancelot, takes advantage of the covering mist to attack. With the supernaturally formed Excalibur, Arthur overcomes Mordred’s invulnerability against manmade weapons. Mordred impales Arthur, recalling the death of the Duke of Cornwall, which coincided with Arthur’s conception. As the sword previously waited for its time, so it returns to the waters of the Lady’s Lake and Arthur floats across the sea toward his renewal. (Comparable to this mesh of repetitions, framed by the characters falling into dream or trance at climatic moments, Erickson employed in his narratives symmetries so elaborate they transcended conscious detection; he found, they would catch the attention of the unconscious, thereby aiding inductions).
As in Kundun, the education of Excalibur’s semi-divine
king ends tragically, for reasons conforming with René Girard’s theories about
how the model of a community must perish. Otherwise, his followers would envy the
character on whom they have been modeling themselves and break rapport. Stripped
of earthly power, the Dalai Lama and King Arthur become pure ideals to be emulated–Obi-wan
Kenobis–voices in the mind.
Arthurian legends long fascinated Boorman: “I was struck, at that period of my life
[eighteen-years old], by the power of the Arthurian resonances, which I rediscovered
in Eliot's The Waste Land and numerous other works. It was as though, with
almost everything I read, I'd find myself confronted with the Grail cycle” (Ciment
185).
Knowing that audiences cannot be expected to share all his enthusiasms, he collaborates with Rospo Pallenberg (Boorman 189). Although Boorman finds the latter’s writing occasionally awkward and pedestrian, someone down-to-earth is needed to make Boorman’s visions comprehensible to spectators (Ciment 192). The mingled fantasy and verisimilitude produces magic realism, reconciling unconscious and conscious.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 1
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