LOVE AND WAR

by Stanley

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon the renunciation of instinct. Sigmund Freud.

Everyone knows that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, but not everyone knows the real story from Homer’s Odyssey. Venus is, of course, the goddess of love, but she’s not the sort of warm, fuzzy love-girl you might expect. She is a ruthless sexual predator with no respect for marriage or fidelity – or at least, that’s how the beautiful goddess is portrayed. Her husband, Vulcan, poor chap, is a lame and unattractive smithy, a blacksmith, of whom, she says, she can always rely on for fixing things around the house. In other words, although he too is one of the gods, he sounds a pretty ordinary sort of chap trying to do the best he can with his adorable, but promiscuous wife.

One of the best stories in the Odyssey is where she has it off with Mars, the brutal and handsome god of war. There’s no doubt that, strong though he is, he is no match for her overwhelming sexual allure. Funny isn’t it: in real life it’s men who are inclined to be sexually predaceous. But as always, the woman gets the blame. Obviously, Mars is innocent – she enticed him and led him on.

Anyway, it turns out that Vulcan, probably limping along after a day’s honest toil in the workshop, catches the two of them in flagrante delicto, red handed, as they say. Being a man (or rather a god) of technical ingenuity, Vulcan knocks up a strong net which he casts over them while they are actually doing it. Well, they are simply caught and can’t get away. To punish them Vulcan calls upon all the gods of Olympus to come and witness the scene. They all have a jolly good laugh and it’s all very embarrassing. Hermes, one of the more delightful of the gods, says he would endure any punishment for one night of love with Venus.

Much has been made of this story over the centuries. It was a favourite subject for allegorical paintings of the Renaissance. Both Veronese and Botticelli show Mars quite vanquished and docile in the arms of Venus. It has been said that the meaning is quite clear; she has defeated the god of war himself, or in other words ‘love conquers all’.

James Hillman made a quite different interpretation. The association between Mars and Venus signifies, he says, that man has an on going affair, a Terrible Love of War – the title of his last book. And the fact that the story is played out by the immortal gods means that our love of war is an eternal part of us, and we are not to expect any improvement in human nature, or expect that our practice of war will ever diminish. ‘There have been roughly two and a half wars going on for every year of recorded history’, says Hillman, ‘Can it be doubted that not only is war "normal", but that it is a manifestation of a force as powerful to our species as is Eros or Death, and far more permanent than the Peace it outstrips?”

I’m going to offer a completely different interpretation.

Freud was on to something when he said that civilisation is built upon the renunciation of the instincts; to be civilised we have to repress them. He also believed that instincts were discreet forces, psychic energies. We know today that the picture is a little more complicated. But for simplicity, just lets say that there is something called an ‘aggressive instinct’ and something called a ‘sexual instinct’. That’s more or less the idea in the myth. Venus = the sexual instinct and Mars = the aggressive instinct.

But where does Vulcan fit in? Doesn’t he stand for the containment, the capturing of the instincts? It is significant that Vulcan is the technician, the workman; he is domesticated and a skilled toolmaker; bringer of culture, invention, trade and eventually globalisaion – in fact, everything that Freud meant by ‘civilisation’. Vulcan puts the instincts to shame, exposing them and demonstrating how disruptive to civilised domesticity they can be. Granted, Vulcan is lame in his domesticity, but it is the lameness that goes with the repression of the instincts – the price, Freud said, we have to pay for civilisation.

Falling in love and succumbing to the allurements of Venus is, by itself, not enough to contain war and the chaotic mayhem of the undisciplined instincts. Without Vulcan and his influence Hillman is right; there is nothing to stop the excesses of those two primitive instincts. With Vulcan, and an intelligent accommodation with growing modernity, we can and do gradually move forward into a more peaceful life. But it takes the ‘civilizing process’ to do it, something we used to call – before it was unfashionable to use the word – progress. Self assertion and lust are valuable human assets. The problem is not how to renounce them, but how to refine their expression.

The first stages of our civilizing process in the disciplining the instincts was a pretty rough sledgehammer repression. The mediaeval church taught us how to do that in a big way: masses of sexual guilt and obscenely cruel punishments for disobedience. But rough as it was, it was a step towards a more discriminating and intelligent society. The next stage was the 18^th century Enlightenment, the beginning of science and the beginning of a more psychological and human understanding of the mind.

We’re not doing too badly really. Our sex lives are probably freer that they have ever been without he need for the spoils of war: ‘rape all the women and kill all the men’ – a customary practice in the good old days.

Certainly the raw sexual instinct has to be curbed, but there are clever, discrete, artistic and harmless ways of sexual expression without making it bad, disowning it, and then being sadly deprived. And, as for aggression, we now have courts of law instead of duels, suits for defamation of character instead of honour killings, divorces instead of marital death by attrition; and our aggressive instinct is now reduced to watching The World Cup on the telly. Life can still be rough, but it is much less lethal than it used to be. War, as we have known it, is a casualty of human progress. It is more clearly recognized now that we can realistically no longer afford it – the ‘markets’ would be upset – and that would never do!

I think the fact that one can make so many different interpretations of the Mars/Venus/Vulcan myth demonstrates something about mythical interpretation in general. It seems that what one gets from a myth is a picture one has already arrived at. My perception does not derive from the myth itself or from any fancy archetypal footwork, but from a more reliable kind of research; that, I will tell you about in my next blog.