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DEADLY VICES 2(1)

The theme of the deadly sins opens a whole new scope for understanding our emotional patterns and social behaviour; if we manage to go beyond the moral prejudices inherited by centuries of hypocrisy and social and religious intolerance that the word ‘sin’ suggests, then we can also get rid of the psychological brands that the XX century printed in our minds about syndromes and emotional disorders. Instead of reducing our fears, obsessions and insecurities to neurosis, manias or mental diseases, we can talk about mistaken points of view and wrong attitudes about our self (sense of identity) and about our relations to other people. As we mentioned in the previous article, ‘committing a sin’ means making a mistake.



What I find more impressing in this approach is the possibility of transformation of an old pattern into a complete opposite mental outlook; spiritual traditions recommended to use a specific virtue to fight again a deadly vice, and this not only meant to be liberated from a sin, but to be able transform it into its opposite. The aim is to convert negative and destructive energy into positive and creative energy. For example, where the tradition prescribed charity to fight against greed, we must understand that a person prone to greed can develop a sense of what needing means and what kind of security he can provide; such a person can also develop an understanding for other people’s needs and miseries and then help them accordingly.

This time we are going to focus on covetousness (greed); next time we will explore envy and pride; we are going now to concentrate ourselves on how these sins can provoke the death of the Self and how we can transform them into their opposite virtues. We will present the chart of the great French writer Honore de Balzac; first, because I think that he had all those vices himself, but mostly because he succeeded in sublimating them through his work as a novelist. Balzac wrote dozens of novels, all of them form part of one of the most ambitious literary projects; the Human Comedy, as the whole is known, intended to portray all kinds of human beings, all possible passions mankind can experience and every material situation of the human condition, like health and illness, poverty and wealth.

I spent many years reading and studying Balzac; believe me, I learned more from his psychological analysis and exploration of human motives than I did from Freud or Marx. When you go to Paris, please visit the Rodin museum and look for the Monument to Balzac; Rodin, a Scorpio, captured the titanic strength and power of this fabulous writer, a Taurus. It is a good opportunity for those interested in astrology and archetypes to see and feel the current of energy in the axis Taurus-Scorpio.

Honore de Balzac was born the 20th of May, 1799, at 11am in Tours, a beautiful French Medieval city near the Loire; he died at the age of 51, but he managed to write around one hundred novels. Balzac used to write night and day drinking lots of coffee, he was always in need of money, his house had a back door he used when he wanted to go out unnoticed to escape from his creditors. But this huge bulky man built up a whole universe where everything is connected, his characters appear in different novels, he follows their development, their fall, their rebirth, or their death; we see them in all kinds of situations; most important, Balzac weaves a complex and unending web with their passions and interactions among them.
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Honore de Balzac
20 May 1799
11am
Tours, France


For Balzac, the distribution of capital is the engine that makes the Human Comedy work; its characters, men and women, young or old, have or do not have money, some have little money, some lots of it; passion is the fuel that circulates through the nerves of this complex system.  This Taurus writer knew that the need of security was the most basic instinct of Man, that modern civilization depended of money and exploitation, and that any individual needed money to occupy a safe place in the social scale. Therefore, we can see how the need of security leads to greed, greed to envy, and envy to pride.

Covetousness, the need to possess something, or too much of something, becomes a deadly vice when in entails a loss of comfort and enjoyment; the greedy avaricious cannot be comfortable, either he becomes obsessed by acquiring or grabbing something he wants, especially if other person has it, or he cannot feel safe with his possessions out of fear of being stolen. Nothing is enough for him, whatever he possesses is little according to his fantasy of fulfilment; the pleasure of acquiring something is very ephemeral, he immediately wants what he does not have; he lives tormented by the fear of being deprived of his hoard.  The avaricious finds no peace, no way for expansion is left; greed annihilates any possibility for discovery the Self.

There are many famous misers in literature since the Greek and Roman times, many great writers, Moliere’s is a famous one, have created one. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a good example because it shows how greed can destroy not only the sinner but people around him; Shylock, the main character, wants a pound of Antonio’s own flesh in exchange of the money this one owes him. But the most appalling miser in literature appears in Balzac’s novel Eugenie Grandet. Monsieur Grandet, a wealthy provincial man, has built up a sort of prison for his daughter Eugenie, Balzac describes minutely his habits, his mean ways of ruling the economy of his house; when he dies, Eugenie falls in love with an totally unworthy man, she pays his debts and then he abandons her; at the end Eugenie leads a lonely life and starts becoming like her father.

In Eugénie Grandet, Balzac shows how deeply a miser can hurt people around him; since the greedy avaricious cannot enjoy anything, the person becomes mean; and consciously or unconsciously he prevents people around him from being be happy. Whoever has met a miser can see how gloomy and uncomfortable his style of life can be; throughout this novel, the reader experiences a suffocating sensation; it is always too hot or too cold; the accumulated wealth becomes oppressive. The combination of Earth (Sun in Taurus) and Fire (Moon in Sagittarius) in Balzac's chart might be associated with this choking sensation; earth stifles fire. Prone to covetousness by his Taurus and Mercury in the Midheaven, Balzac transcended this tendency writing (Mercury) about those characters, he generously dedicated his life to leave us this monumental legacy of profound psychological analysis about human nature. He case is, precisely, also good example of how the energy can be transformed; Balzac became generous without repressing his covetousness; on the contrary, he used his voracity of knowledge about other people’s lives by portraying the deadly sins the XIX century society was trapped in, he meant to help them out.(to be continued)

In Japanese
DEADLY VICES 1(1)
DEADLY VICES 1(2)

by xavier_astro | 2012-02-01 00:00 | 心理  

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