A reader named Bill sent me a really interesting thought in regards to my archon card. I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing it here:

In ‘Further Along the Road Less Traveled,’ Dr. Peck talks about the story of Orestes. Orestes had murdered his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of his father Agamemnon. This was how he chose to settle his internal conflict between the horror of murdering his own mother and the compulsion to avenge the murder his father. He had to chose one or the other course of action.

In revenge he’s pursued by horrible hags known as the Erinyes, or Furies, and eventually put on trial, in Peck’s story, by the Gods. He is defended by Apollo. The Gods are getting ready to absolve him of all responsibility, but he refuses their offer, choosing instead to take full responsibility for his actions. With this gesture the Erinyes are all at once beings of light, joy, and creation — the Eumenides — and they bless him with life and good judgement.

I’m wondering if we should think of Archons in a similar manner? Maybe they’re the Aeons in some kind of strange disguise. […]

I really like this idea and think it opens a lot of doors to other levels of understanding. It’s sort of similar to what I wrote in my articles “Saving Satan” and “God Gets Lonely Too“. But this is I think a rather more eloquent and simple explanation.

Philip K. Dick also talks about this roughly in Divine Invasion in regard to the Advocate and the Cosmic Justice Machine. As a quick summary: the Justice Machine is essentially the mechanistic wheel of Karma. You are paid back in kind based on the actions you commit during your life. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - the system is perfectly fair, balanced and impartial. This is the weighing of the heart we see in Egyptian paintings. At some point God decided he wanted to “feed mercy into the circuit”. He calls this invention the “beside helper” or the Advocate. In an old article I wrote:

Basically, the premise is that, each person, before the moment of their judgement is offered a choice. They can be fed into the “cosmic justic machine” and have it compute based on that person’s deeds and misdeeds. Or, they can take the assistance of the Beside-Helper. What this figure does then is it feeds in its own records of deeds and misdeeds into the cosmic justice machine in place of yours. But it’s record is completely blank, so the machine sort of misfires.

Dick says something about how it was an attempt to introduce “mercy into the circuit”. There is, of course, a conundrum in the whole thing. First of all, anyone who is truly innocent has no need of the Advocate to intercede on their behalf. Second, most people who are guilty, don’t accept the help of the Advocate, because they believe they are innocent. Essentially, in order to get the help of the Advocate, you must first admit to yourself that you truly are responsible, that you truly are guilty and deserve to be punished. And very few people are ever willing to admit that.

The whole thing ties in rather neatly with one of the stages of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, as well: Atonement with the Father. In this stage, the hero must overcome the authority figure against which he has struggled (remember, in Greek archon = “authority”). The only way to overcome this shadowy oppressive opponent though is usually by fusing with it, and recognize that you and he are one in the same: “Luke, I am your father.”

This I think sheds marvelous new meaning on Robert Anton Wilson’s quote:

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

In other words, every ardent conspiracy theorist is no different from the Illuminati/New World Order/Reptilians who they rail against. It would mean I am George W. Bush and you are Dick Cheney. Just like the Rolling Stones declared in Sympathy for the Devil:

I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me

This sort of thinking of course goes against everything counter-culturalists and conspiracy theorists of all stripes stand for. We’re not the bad guys! We’re against the bad guys! But I think the realization ultimately becomes that the thing you are against is your shadow. The thing you most fear is your own dark side creeping about in the background. And only by bringing it into yourself, embracing it, will you be able to move on and heal yourself. Jung writes of the person who is able to honestly deal with their own shadow:

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

Good stuff.