The English word dragon translated into Spanish is ‘continuar’ (the verb ‘to continue’).
Through the mystique of the dragon battle, the individual and his princess come together in fulfillment of the sacred sub-pattern of the Platonic ideal—co-integration, the pattern of the pater, the father, the properly conscious man oriented in life to undertake difficulties with broad shoulders—shoulders broadened by his battles with dragons who hoard the gold—the sacred, golden lessons in life.
If you translate ‘continue’ from English into Spanish, you get the verb ‘to follow,’ ‘seguir.’
You’d think the dragon is something to NOT follow, to NOT continue on the path toward, something not to pursue. It is a dragon after all.
But: the dragon is the battle ground of the ego hero and represents the battles that, if won, will bring him into proper relationship to first, the great parents, and next, to his anima, his personal psychic animating factor, the princess, or more precisely, his idea of the ideal princess––the projection whom he cannot help but rescue even at the cost of life, limb, or worse, rejection––for, she contains bivalent properties, fascinating, libido- (life-energy) activating properties: his symbolic conquering of nature in the conquering of her body and the image of the holy mother (both his mother and the Great Mother). The explanation of this exogamous male pursuit by orthodox Darwinian ‘reproductive drive’ does not fit here. The drive is physical, yes, but once psychologized, it can be said that these complexes animate him with much more real energy than do his endogenous hormones alone. The body and the mind –the five senses and the sixth– clearly cooperate psychobiologically.
In the first battle (during puberty) she, the first dragon, represents the archetypal mother conflict, individualization from the parents, his first formal recognition of self as independent, becoming a man capable of managing his own family unit, responsibility. This has historically been a transition made via male rites of passage. Today’s terribly diminished masculinity, resulting from capitalistic hyper-individualization and atomization yielding wild misapprehensions about and abhorrent ritual replacements by young men of the ancient rites, the all to predictable outcomes of such endeavors, is further diminished by the subsequent blanket demonization of ‘Masculinity’ proper by our over-socialized liberal monoculture and its obsession with equitable outcomes for the should-be hopeful princess-turning-queen, given the death of her prince by the cultural flattening scorched earth policy of Capitalism, turning her into the dragon slayer herself––but in so doing, does she not hold the sword to her own throat?
This first dragon is often symbolized by a dragon of the sea, the whale. The father (as in the tale of Pinnoccio) –more precisely, the spirit of the father– sits in the whale’s belly leagues below the safe, calm surface, the teacher patiently awaiting the student. In order that he might find a ‘holy spirit,’ the spirit of one of his ancestors and perhaps a persona, a mask to wear out in the world ––some ‘brave face’ (in Spanish, ‘cara’ or ‘mascara’) that will en-courage him with the gusto of his heroic forefathers, men of whose evidence for the possibility of victory over Nature’s wrath and entropy the boy himself constitutes and thereby validates such a spirit’s mana, its power, as self-evident; for, if he exists, his forefathers whom he hopes to embody against his existential threats, the frightful wraiths that drawn him to plunge the depths into which he is eminently about to dive, then his father’s spirit was enough for survival; and like Simba saw Mufassa in the water’s reflection, he can see his father, his proof and his hope in his own face, his own ‘cara,’ his own mask, his courage–– he must dare the deep dark unconscious ocean. This spirit, in one way the personal mask, bears a message to the boy, the message to all male children of the father, God, “Give up your life and you will live forever.” This is one of the deepest Christian messages: ego subjugation. The integration of the shadow, the subjugation of the ego to make way for the Spirit at center; these are the signs that Rapunzel is looking for before she’ll let down her hair, before the prince can marry the princess, before he is integrated enough, coherent and aligned enough to become a king. For what is a king but a sacrifice, a shoulder to bear the burden of responsibility for all burdens however unjustly life may heap them upon him?
In his second battle of masculine life, of proper heroic development, he, now individuated from the parents, now must individuate from his own ego using the tools of abstraction, sacrifice, and self-symbolization in the process of secondary personalization. In this battle, he is further learning to subjugate his ego (heightened from victorious individuation in the first battle) as to integrate and discriminate the use of aggression against femininity, which is perpetually calling him into unconsciousness: having rebelled against the mother’s protective but Oedipal desire for his remaining unconscious, he must now concern himself with slaying the dragon of the princess, her psychological armor against a false, unintegrated prince, to tame and dress his beast into a suit wearing, sword wielding but most often sheathed, mimic of his father, the king—without whom he has no means through the rites of passage that whisper in him from a knowing elder who’s been through his own battles with these two dragons:
“Siga, continuar, the treasure is on the other side, don’t fall into unconsciousness, do battle with it properly, and you will become a king like me, here is how, here is practice in the rites, here are the secrets, here is your animal totem, your persona, your mask, the particular archetype of manhood that I’ve carefully observed best fits you, your own archetypal Way through the battle, the emblem on your own personal sword seared by your progenitor and by all of your ancestors thereby; and she will let her hair down to you for slaying her defensive dragon, siga, follow, continue, you can do it.”
The encouragement of the father in the rites of passage is crucial for both the boy who aims to turn from prince into king, and for the girl who without proper masculinity derived from those sacred, now denigrated as passé rites of passage (you see, the ‘passage’ is the symbolic pursuit, the continuing on, the following if the path through to the dragon battles) must either stay locked in her tower under the curse of Oedipus, or must become the prince herself, armor up, and go on her own journey, needless of a prince.
Scale this up for modernity and capitalism, hyperindividualization, the coming to masculine heroic ego consciousness by both sexes, even if due to the equitizing results of male ego heroic self realization itself, and she’ll freeze her eggs, abstract the phallus, auto impregnate, and the new man —the boy— will never differentiate.
Set, Seth, the spirit of Satan’s anti-ego-development role (eg ‘Scar’ in the Lion King) as dephalicizor of Osiris —the embodied spirit of proper masculinity— and as the preventer of the birth of the kingdom-renewing savior: Horus, Moses, Christ, The dualistic donkey-ogre, the fool-savior-upright-humbled-prince) in service of the Terrible Mother, the great unconscious anti-centrovertive self-preservational drive of Mother Nature (confusingly, often via the trickster’s over identification with the very egoic striving we describe here in the dragon battles eg. Prince Farquad). Isis will determine if best to reign alone and the body of Osiris will forever float down river.
The boy stands in this case to fall back into the castrated ward of the mother, and the kingdom will fall to the State as the woman takes queenship, and she will outsource her would-be noble king’s integratedly (discerning) masculine defense against her physical and felt sense of vulnerability, to the policies and police under her command.
MASCULINIZE your boys! Tell them “Siga! Continuar!” Rediscover the rites of passage, re-architect them, save every worthy princess from the fate of a lonely -if powerful- queen’s bed devoid of the proper future king, your sons. The alternative is to have failed as the bearer of the pattern of the eternal father, the Platonic Ideal, in the profoundest way.
Slay your dragons or live with the wrath of Kali. The choice and responsibility are yours.