I recently came across an image on the Web picturing the all seeing eye of Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings, positioned on top of The White House in Washington. My first reaction was a smile, followed by a nod, and then recognition.
Anyone knows what this means. United States of America is currently the most powerful world empire of today. This is not to say that other empires are much less powerful. Now we’re in the beginning of the 21st century and there are quite a few dominating powers. We have Russia, China, and Europe as the largest contenders, but there are others who are also powerful.
At any given time in history people of the free mind see the ruling forces of their current times as evil, or representatives of darkness or oppression of some kind. This is not new and prevails through centuries. If we’d go to Africa in the early 1700’s we’d see England and France as coax of the same spirit.
Sometimes we have another tendency which is to regard fiction writing as pure fantasy and we disregard its meanings. This is a folly which most writers should find it easy to explain to you. When a writer forms a story line he binds it together with knowledge from his consciousness, forms ideas from his subconscious and perceives through the mind of the collective-subconscious.
This means that all his knowledge and skills produce the writing itself. His dreams and fantasies inspire the story and its storyline. The cultural spirit he belongs to drive his view of the world. While writing he enters a kind of meditative stance – and this is true to most writers – where he binds all these forces together into one, the fourth: Himself. He writes and when he is finished he hardly knows where the writing came from, like if it formed a life of its own.
When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings he did just the same. It is easy to see when you read his stories how the political arena of his time entered the story, along with his personal views and history, combined with his knowledge of myths and folklore. It is truly fascinating as a fantasy novel, but it also has a ring of truth. This is true of most fantasies.
Furthermore, most fantasies have hidden magic, but to go there would be out of scope for this article.
We have this frightening tendency to look around for the devil outside us. We find him in evil empires, evil groups, lurking in the shadows, in other people’s words and works, but never within. But the devil has no hold of you if he has nothing to grab hold of inside you. Don’t forget that he originated as an angel of light, and transformed himself into a deceiver and a demon of seduction. Therefore he always appears to you as an angelic shining deceiver seducing you to either the seat of power or to the replacement without.
A replacement without is when you replace one empire with another, but both of them based upon an outwardly object or power. The darkness is within each of us. So is the light switch. Who rules us is the one we’re most attracted to according to which force is stronger within, I regret to say.
If you wish to see the evil go away, you must first learn how to shun it, and that you can only do if you shun the evil inside your own self.
