This century had inherited the Earth in every sense. And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious mortality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried the standards. However, quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about peace and the poor and the planet as if driven by a mystical zeal. Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of environmental pollution and the loss of wild animals and the holocaustal war they battled as fiercely as mortals have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past. A classic portrayal of the projection of destiny is found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the fashion typical of the times, Shakespeare uses the three witches, called by him “the Weird Sisters,” as the screen on which Macbeth’s drive for power and ambition are projected. In this tragedy it is crucial that Shakespeare present Macbeth in the beginning as a good man, universally admired and respected by his peers. This sets that stage for Macbeth’s profound and tragic conflict between this, the “public,” side of his personality and his repressed power drives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

A character sketch of Macbeth is given to us by Lady Macbeth near the beginning of the play: “Thy nature; it is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win.’ Macbeth is presented in the hour of his greatest success as leader of the army on the day of victory. This is the moment when we are all open to the greatest temptations of power and ambition and the time when Macbeth is most open to his own sense of destiny. As one Shakespearean scholar states: “Experience has taught that to good mortals the day of greatest achievement proves too often the day of fate; that few natures can withstand the evil promptings to greater glory which come in the day of success.” Macbeth also possesses a poetic nature and an active and pretentious imagination, which reminds us of the role of imagination in the witchcraft of the times. He is always communicating asides to the audience, telling us his inner thoughts: he sees ghost and apparitions and hallucinates the dagger hanging in the air before him. Lady Macbeth rightly states, “Your face, my thane, is as a book were mortals may read strange matters.” During the drama he vacillates between his power drive and his human compassion, as illustrated in his cry after murdering Duncan the king, “Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I wouldst thou couldst!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

The play opens on a stormy day with the witches dancing around their fire as they chant on the heath: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Thus, as was the practice of witches, they deny the standard of ethics in their first line. They likewise destroy the standard of aesthetics: the brew around which they dance is made up of such things as “Finger of birth-strangled babe” and “grease that’s sweatn’s from the murderer’s gibbet.” Macbeth’s first words as he comes on the stage with Banquo echoes what the witches have just said, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” He is wholly unconscious of any relation with these supernatural agents of evil. The audience knows that this signifies some link between Macbeth and the witches, some unconscious relationship with the Weird Sisters. The witches then predict that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and king that Banquo’s children will be king to come. Banquo brushes off the witches’ message, saying it is nothing: “The Earth hat bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.” He asks Macbeth whether they have eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.” However, Macbeth, with his poetic nature and already drawn into a relationship with occult powers, cannot brush the witches’ predication aside, especially since they are the screen on which he projects his unconscious urgings. The witches, indeed, are constituted by Macbeth’s own unconscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

One might ask: Why does Banquo see the witches at all if they are projections of Macbeth’s suppressed evil hopes and fears? Shakespeare was writing a drama, not a psychoanalytic paper, and took whatever poetic license he needed. However, it is a fact that when we project our own evil, we can make it sound rational enough to get our friends to see it even though they do not take it as seriously as we do. Macbeth cannot rid his imagination of these prophecies from the witches. When other lords arrive to inform him that he has indeed been rewarded for the victory by being appointed Thane of Cawdor, Banquo cries, “What, can the devil speak true?” But Macbeth ponders the dilemma in an aside, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, why hath it given me earnest of success, commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart known at my ribs, against the use of nature? He is so caught up and overwhelmed by these thoughts that he can only add another paradox: “Nothing I but what is not.” Thus, he again agrees with the witches’ denial of the base of ethical standards. However, his vacillation goes on: “If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me without my sir.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

We see in this the drama of the damnation of a great soul, the struggle of a once good man with his destiny. Lady Macbeth plays the part of a human representative of fate, a situation similar to Macbeth’s own projection on the witches. Her portrait is drawn by Shakespeare as the opposite of Macbeth’s: she is not poetic but practical, cold, calculating, even ruthless. She crimes in speaking of nursing her baby, “I would, while it was smiling in my face have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums and dash’d is brains out, had I so sworn as you have done.” As the representative of fate, she used every kind of persuasion from scorn to cajoling to force Macbeth “to screw his courage to the sticking point,” until finally her husband, in a salute to her steellike will, adjures her to “bring forth men-children only!” Murder follows murder as this fate is lived out—the assassination of Banquo and the killing of Macduff’s wife and children. Macbeth is vacillating and remorseful all the while, until at the end he becomes desperate. The “milk of human kindness” is now lost in his deeper and deeper inner conflict, depression, and ultimate destruction. Like the rest of us, Macbeth cannot take responsibility for his own fate. He goes back three times to the witches for reassurance. Hecate, queen of the witches, states to her minions, “Thither he will come to know his destiny. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

And she instructs her witches on how they will delude Macbeth further: “Raise such artificial sprites as by the strength of their illusion shall draw him on to his confusion. He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear his hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear. And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy. Macbeth’s life has become empty, as in the “tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, but more than that: “There is nothing serious in mortality; all is but toys.” True to Hecate’s prediction, Macbeth does come back again “to know his destiny” and is bolstered by the witches’ statement that he will not die “till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” and no one “born of woman” will be able to kill him. Both of these turn out to be illusions. And in the last scene Macduff marches on stage with MacBeth’s head. It is not by accident that this drama, which is so psychoanalytic, is also the one where Shakespeare makes his most specific references to mental healing. After Lady Macbeth, herself at last the prey of overwhelming guilt, walks in her sleep, trying to wipe out of the blood on her hand, and Macbeth and the doctor he has called watch her, Macbeth pleads with the physician, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

When the doctor answers, “Therein the patient must minister to himself,” Macbeth expostulates, “Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.” Relevant also is the doctor’s earlier remark: “More needs she the divine than the physician.” The destiny of Macbeth, we assume, is a combination of the design of his own nature in the conflict with the external situation in which he finds himself. This conflict confronts us all, and to the extent that we can embrace it, we avoid the need to repress it and then to project it upon somebody or something outside ourselves. Dramatic tragedies have such a powerful impact on us because we observe on the stage a good person who, like Macbeth, may be universally admired and respected by his peers but who succumbs to the conflicts that were always present in himself and who then slowly disintegrates before our eyes. Good people, as we have said, have a capacity for evil that balances their goodness. The saints throughout history have declared—and there is no reason to doubt their judgment—that they were also great sinners. This does not necessarily mean that they did specific evil things—which may or may not be the case. It does mean that, ethically speaking, goodness and evil are to be understood at one’s sensitivity to the effect of one’s actions and thoughts on oneself and on one’s community. Holy men and woman are saints precisely because of their highly developed sensitivity to goodness and evil. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

In the unconscious mind, a person’s goodness is in direct proportion to one’s potentialities for evil. The unconscious this compensates for and balances consciousness. As one becomes sensitive to one’s greater good, one also has the potentiality for greater evil. It is the latter that the witches represent. The higher we are able to go, the lower we can sink. The necessary thing is to be able to acknowledge and confront one’s evil fate. A tragedy is a situation, like Queen Akasha’s in The Queen of the Damned, in which she cannot take control of her destiny nor even rebel against her destiny as it has already been block off by supernatural powers. The spirits were only visible at night, and they were never visible for more than a second, and usually only when the spirits were in rage. Their size was enormous. They would tell the witches that they could not imagine how big they were. That they exert great force upon the physical World is beyond doubt. Otherwise how could they move objects as they do in poltergeist hauntings? And how could they have brought the clouds to make the rain? Whatever their material makeup is, they have no apparent biological needs, these entities. They do not age; they do not change. And the key to understanding their youthful and whimsical behavior is possessed in this. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Why witches attract them or interest them I do not know either. However, that is the crux of it; they see the witch, they go to her, make themselves known to her, and are powerfully flattered when they are noticed; and they do her bidding in order to get more attention; and in some cases to be loved. And as this relationship progresses, they are made for the love of the witch to concentrate on various tasks. It exhausts them but it also delights the, to see human beings so impressed. However, imagine now, how much fun it is for them to listen to prayers and try to answer them, to hang about altars and make thunder after sacrifices are offered up. When a clairvoyant calls upon the spirit of a dead ancestor to speak to one’s descendants, they are quite thrilled to start chattering away in pretense of being the dead ancestor, though of course they are not that person; and they will telepathically extract information from the brains of the descendants in order to delude them all the more. Akasha, a beauty of the royal family, was brought into Enkil’s kingdom to be his wife, she was not drawn from his people, but from the city of Uruk in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.  The Nile farmers were horrified that the beautiful Akasha would set about at once to turn them away from their barbaric habit of making war for human flesh. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

And it was so, tribes were no longer allowed to hunt for flesh and the flesh of the dead would be secured in linen wrappings at great expense, and these intact bodies were to be displayed for all to see, and the placed in tombs with proper offerings and incantations of the priest. Akasha and Enkil convinced them that if the bodies were preserved in these wrappings on Earth, the spirts of the dead would fare better in the realm to which they had gone. In other words, the people were told, “Your beloved ancestors are not neglected; rather they are well kept.” They worshipped the god Osiris, and he Sun god, Ra. Then years later, Akasha and Enkil requested the witch twins Mekare and Maharate to visit them because they had heard of their great powers. However, upon visiting Akasha, the twins brought an evil spirit with them, one named Amel that has worked evil for wizards and could torment people, bedevil them, even prick them as if he were a swarm of gnats! He could draw blood from humans, and he declared; and he liked the taste of it. When the twins saw Enkil and Akasha, they were upon their thrones. The Queen was a woman of straight shoulders and firm limbs with a face almost too exquisite to evince intelligence, a being of enticing prettiness with a soft treble voice. As for the King, he was no loner a soldier, but a sovereign. His hair was plaited, and he wore his formal kilt and jewels. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

As the Queen started to ask the witch twins how they work their magic, and Amel was there lurking, waiting. Within an instant the wind hand begun. It howled through the courtyard and whistled through the corridors of the palaces. The draperies were torn by it; doors slammed; fragile vessels were smashed. The Queen was in a state of terror as she felt it surrounding her. The king tried to protect her and told her he had witnessed this spectacle before, but she had never witnessed the slightest proof of the supernatural. The spirit had entered her and after the twins visited the kingdom, a great darkness pervaded, until the villagers blamed the King and Queen and killed them. As the blood was leaving Akasha bodies, a blood mist surrounded her and she came back to life. Then she brought the king back to life. People worshipped them as gods because they had vanquished death, but they felt betrayed by the Sun God Ra and could not go in the Sun or even endure bright lights. Akasha and Enkil had become the first vampires, and it was a fate they did not want for they foresaw what would happen if people found out or if other vampires were created. They created one, Khayman, to test their powers, and he would ultimately lead to their downfall by protecting their enemies, and they tried to turn Earth into the Kingdom of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Societies also go through the process of repression and projection that produces witches and witchcraft. Sometimes it takes the form of scapegoating, as when it was used against underrepresented groups in our times. Every nation in wartime shouts out to its people the atrocities committed by the enemy and projects its own repressed aggression on the enemy. Thus freed of their own guilt at killing and given tangible devils to fight, the people can unite on the side of God, democracy, and freedom. Like the good people of the Middle Ages, we are the righteous ones, struggling against the representatives of Satan as Akasha and Enkil believed themselves to be doing. When we are told that we cannot talk with certain people because they do not believe in God and an afterlife, we can see this in our own country. And The Queen of the Damned was a warning about even associating with people who play with dark forces, as you see how that spirit, Amel, he predated humans and had never been in a body cursed Akasha and her King. Whether we take the statement about not tampering with evil as sincere or just as something made by officials simply as a way of enlisting the support of the religious masses, the dynamics are the same. It is the dynamic of witchcraft all over again. Witchcraft led to torture and burning at the sake in past centuries, and such behavior can lead us and our World into unimaginable tragedy—atomic warfare. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

If we are to have compassion and empathy for others who are different from us, but whom we must co-exist, coming to terms with our own destiny is essential in a World with possibilities of unprecedented cruelty. Many among us, Christians and secularists, point to their tradition which goes back to the Church Fathers, or to the popes, or to the reformers, or to the makers of the American Constitution. Their church or their nation is their mother, so they have all the truth and do not need to worry about the question of truth. Would Jesus tell them, perhaps, what he told the Jews—that even if the church or that nation is their mother, they carry with them the heritage of the father of untruth; that they truth they have is not the truth which makes free? Certainly there is no freedom where there is self-complacency about the truth of one’s own beliefs. There is no freedom where there is ignorant and fanatical rejection of foreign ideas and ways of life. There is not freedom but demonic bondage, like we see among many from the Pocket/Greenhaven community in Sacramento, California USA, where laws and rights do not matter because one’s own truth is called the ultimate truth. For this an attempt to be like God, an attempt which is made in the name of God or some other entity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13