4. When guiding spirits go off course

Below are two separate yet entwined introductions of Rosamund St. George, MD. First from page 5 of John Levesque's version of Geneva Farewell:

"The hum of forced air from a register behind St. George's armchair now joins the prolonged drone of her voice. She is a portrait of grim professionalism in decline. Doctor Freud's talking cure is a hundred years old, exhausted as the century he inflicted it on, yet she honours its musty liturgy."

Second, from Samla BIshap's version of Geneva Farewell, not available in your world, page 4:

"St. George is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, though you would hardly know it from her controlled manner and conservative attire. She is a portrait of grim heroism in decline. She and the Dragon have lost their mojo. The worst she has to fear from it is its damp ashtray breath."

I, Peter Chaff, underwent psychotherapy with Rosamund St. George in the months before I found Geneva Farewell. Also a few weeks after I lost her. (You know this from a previous post and from JL's novel if you have read it.) St. George is her actual name. It does conjure the old archetype of the Knight who confronts a venom-spewing Dragon on behalf of terrorized villagers. But that archetype and its foe are both extinguished, as Samla Bishap informed us above.

Archetypes are the guiding spirits that symbolize what we hold dear and what we fear the most. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf: You can't have one without the other. A rare piece of wisdom that a Translator like Rudy Monteverdi understands from birth is that human archetypes have a natural life cycle. The archetype nourishes and enriches human culture during that cycle. But if left unattended for too long, archetypes inevitably produce widespread turbulence.

Monteverdi: "Through ten thousand years of recorded history we have retooled and recycled archetypes that were already primitive when language was invented to describe them. Everything is covered in rust, welding scars and chemical decomposition. Heroes, Saviours: even the words reek of ancient tombs long since raided. Send in the new archetypes! Compilers! Consolers! Conciliators!..."

Here is marble statue of Hercules, a popular Hero archetype from ancient Rome. Does Hercules speak to us in any way that is applicable to our current situation? "Speak, Hercules!" we can beg him all we like, but he just stands there waiting for someone or something to smite. His day has passed.

In Anglo-America and Europe, most archetypes are crusted in a thick layer of fear-fueled masculine gloop: fear of death, fear of humans who are not male, fear of humans who are not pale-skinned, fear of humans who worship "false gods", etc.

Despite being a pure Protector, Geneva Farewell possessed natural qualities associated with Circe, the ancient Greek enchantress seen here. Circe herself was the residue of powerful female archetypes that were abandoned or suppressed over the millennia. Like many women, Geneva devoted a lot of time to exfoliating this skin-deep remnant of a woman's full birthright.

Rosamund St. George, who was my guiding spirit for a few months, is a frightening example of a degraded archetype. She is a turbulence-monger in the guise of a Restorer. She "reads" me the way a Restorer does, but she learned next to nothing about me during our time together.

I tried in various ways to explain to St. George that I was an Unconscious Catalyst. Catalysts do not traffic in motives -- not even Conscious Catalysts do. My role is purely that of increasing the rate and intensity of a reaction. My root archetype is Prometheus, the god who taught us how to manage fire. I say this in John Levesque's novel, page 220:

"There is no such thing as destruction. Destruction is a ruined word full of obsolete moral implications. There is only transformation. Look at aerial motion pictures of hydrogen explosives detonating far from everyone: Is there a sight more majestic than those billowing sky-high mushrooms? The thirteenth century had its stone cathedrals, the twentieth its megaton temples of fire and smoke."

Motives are retroactive models built from the debris of a reaction. The finest moments of our life occur when we are least conscious of motives, when the archetypal Predator's hopes and fears, and the cultural and religious debris they create, subside for a moment.

Monteverdi says corrupted archetypes are responsible for the long-postponed evolution of humanity from Predator to Caretaker. The archetypes he invokes in Geneva Farewell -- Protectors and Catalysts in John Levesque's version, Translators and Makers in Samla Bishap's version -- are among the this new breed of guiding spirits. "Onward ho," Monteverdi says on page 55 of SB's version, "past all our gods and lesser Predator fears and hopes! Our Caretaker archetypes await us! Not until the old archetypes survive only as garden ornaments can their replacements set a new course for us all."