Santipada

I was enthralled. Spell­bound by the Ring. It was my obses­sion, my world. It made me do the unthink­able. I was driven to deceit, yes, even lying to my own mother.

‘Mum, I feel sick today. I’ve got a tummy ache. I’d bet­ter not go to school.’ Ah, moth­ers. They know. She was too kind to send me to school, and too wise to send me to the doc­tor. So I’d huddle beneath the sheets and jour­ney back to Middle Earth, adven­ture with my friends who seemed so real, so alive, so much truer than those pale wraiths in grey that I found at school.

The Lord of the Rings taps deep well­springs in our con­scious­ness. It’s no coin­cid­ence that the world of Tolkien, that staid bach­elor in tweeds, should have found favor years later with the drugged out free love gen­er­a­tion. Des­pite some unfor­tu­nate lapses in ‘polit­ical cor­rect­ness’ (I once read a hil­ari­ous fem­in­ist decon­struc­tion of The Lord of the Rings), the spir­itual ethos of The Lord of the Rings springs from much the same milieu as the coun­ter­cul­ture move­ments of the six­ties, and later the New Age. The gen­er­a­tion of European schol­ars before Tolkien, his imme­di­ate peers, had accom­plished much in the way of redis­cov­er­ing the lost spir­itu­al­ity of the pre-Christian pagans. (They also provided the first accur­ate ground maps in Europe of the com­plex realm of East­ern reli­gions, although there’s little evid­ence of East­ern influ­ence in Tolkien.) There is no formal reli­gion in Middle Earth. But the over­all effect is deeply spir­itual, a rever­ing of the sac­red imman­ent in nature, with its holi­est fig­ure the white witch Galad­riel. Here I see the influ­ence of schol­ars such as Frazer and Jung, who had con­duc­ted in-depth stud­ies on the psy­cho­logy of myth, and in par­tic­u­lar the sur­vival of prim­it­ive motifs from very ancient times, both bru­tal and beau­ti­ful, beneath a ven­eer of Chris­tian­ity and reason. Tolkien’s work was an attempt to re-ground the Eng­lish con­scious­ness in its own mythic inheritance.

But des­pite the pre­val­ence of pagan motifs, the deep­est eth­ical con­cerns remain thor­oughly Chris­tian. For Tolkien, the greatest evil is pride. Melkor was the migh­ti­est of the gods, who like Satan desired to over­throw the Cre­ator Him­self, only to be cast down and become Mor­goth, the foe of the world. Feanor, the greatest crafts­man of the elves of old, would lay the earth to waste to recover his pre­cious Sil­mar­ils. Atlantis fell due to the mad arrog­ance of the Kings of Men. Ever and again it is pride that wreaks destruction.

And con­versely, humil­ity is the sign of true great­ness. Thus Gan­dalf relin­quished his right­ful place at the head of the Order of Wiz­ards to Sar­u­man, and wanders dis­guised as pur­veyor of party tricks for chil­dren. And Aragorn, the true heir to the Kings of old, is con­tent to labor in dubi­ous obscur­ity as a Ranger for the secur­ity of the North­lands. But in the moral world of Middle Earth, there is a proper place for all, a place largely determ­ined, it would seem, by hered­it­ary lin­eage. One is entitled to a cer­tain status by birth. It is admir­able for the indi­vidual to accept a lower status, but the world at large will only be truly at rights when the great ascend to their right­ful pos­i­tion. This status should be earned, not through per­sonal ambi­tion (the bane of Boromir), but through self-sacrifice, cour­age, and Love.

The strong emphasis on racial and hered­it­ary lin­eages is an intrinsic motif in Tolkien’s search for a cul­ture more deep-rooted in time, yet it strikes an uneasy note today, espe­cially as we remem­ber the racial ideo­logy of Tolkien’s con­tem­por­ar­ies, the Nazis. The Nazis (Nazgul?) were the first to attempt genetic exper­i­ment­a­tion and engin­eer­ing, and our con­science today suf­fers from doubts over the extent to which mod­ern genetic tech­no­logy benefited from inform­a­tion recovered by the Allies from the death camps. In The Lord of the Rings one of Saruman’s greatest crimes, as well as des­troy­ing the trees, was to breed a new race of orc-men, thus per­vert­ing the right­ful order of cre­ation. Tolkien iden­ti­fies cre­ation with the good, and asserts that evil can­not cre­ate any­thing by itself, but can only cor­rupt the true cre­ation. This was a key neo-Platonist idea that became adop­ted by the early Chris­tian Church, that is, that evil has no exist­ence in itself, but is merely the absence of good, just as dark­ness is merely the absence of light. Thus it is impossible to improve upon the will of the Cre­ator; one can only pre­serve the humble aspir­a­tion to be worthy of one’s gifts.

And so the Ring. Truly the strangest of secret weapons, the most curi­ous of talis­mans. It pro­duces no bolts of light­ning, no spec­tac­u­lar feats of magic or of strength. When Frodo puts on the Ring in Mount Doom, he is unable to defeat even the wretched, starving Gol­lum in hand to hand com­bat. All the Ring does is a non-doing – it makes its bearer invis­ible. It is a per­fect unadorned circle, a zero that draws all into its empti­ness. Its bearer becomes con­sumed by fantas­ies of grandeur, fantas­ies appro­pri­ate to each person’s nature. Galad­riel sees her­self as a uni­ver­sal Queen mighty in good­ness. Sam Gamgee sees him­self as the gardener of the world, turn­ing all Middle Earth into a bed of flowers. Yet the more one is seduced into such dreams of power, the more one’s power is drawn into the abyss of the Ring. One’s heart leaches away drop by drop. As pride waxes, wis­dom wanes; and when one’s will, one’s power to choose for right or wrong, is owned by the Ring, one exclaims: ‘It is Mine!’

Tolkien’s abhor­rence of pride mir­rors the cent­ral Buddhist notion of not-self. Yet they are not the same. While Tolkien sees an essen­tially good, abso­lute moral order, with a right­ful place for every­one, the Buddhist moral order is thor­oughly relativ­istic. We are neither inher­ently good nor bad. Each of us has been born count­less times as elves, as dwarves, as orcs, as trolls, as wiz­ards, and yes, as hob­bits too. Evil is just as real as good, and it is our own choice that determ­ines our moral stature, not our genetic or kam­mic inheritance.

This relativ­istic per­spect­ive cuts even deeper into the illu­sion of the self. Tolkien recog­nizes only the pride that says ‘I am bet­ter than you.’ But the Buddha poin­ted out that this is just the coarse level of self-attachment. For many it is even more seduct­ive to assume that ‘I am worse than you’. Here one still holds the basic delu­sion of a self, yet para­dox­ic­ally may fall into a subtle spir­itual pride in one’s own humil­ity. The Chris­tian tra­di­tions at their worst seem to delight in the debase­ment of the indi­vidual, the mor­ti­fic­a­tion of the soul, the belief that one is but a worm in the sight of God. The Buddha, on the other hand, said that as long as one is still crit­ical of one­self one can­not see the truth. The belief that ‘I am worse’ is merely the flip side of the belief that ‘I am better’.

But that’s not all. Even the escape from the dual­ism of ‘bet­ter’ and ‘worse’ does not free one from the most insi­di­ous con­ceit of all: ‘I am equal to you’. We cher­ish the faith that if only we can right all the injustices, end all the ‘isms’ of sex, race, and spe­cies, we can some­how return to our pristine, unspoiled nature, whatever that may be.

Of course, it is not that equal­ity as a social ideal is wrong. On the con­trary I do believe that in some respects our soci­ety is more enlightened than in the past, and that redu­cing the vari­ous forms of injustice, slavery, and dis­crim­in­a­tion has been prob­ably the highest achieve­ment of our mod­ern human­ity so far. But such achieve­ments must forever remain rel­at­ive. We can do bet­ter than the past, and we must strive to do so; yet we can never truly solve the root prob­lem by social justice alone. The forces that give rise to injustice lie within the human mind, and there they must be defeated.

Most adven­ture stor­ies revolve around the Quest. The search for riches, for power, for love. But The Lord of the Rings is a most unusual quest. The forces of good already have the Ring, that which is most Pre­cious. Their prob­lem is to get rid of it. This can only be done by cast­ing it in the fire where it was made. Among mor­tals it is only the Ring-bearers, who have fully felt the seduct­ive power of pride and have let it go, who are per­mit­ted to pass over to the West­ern Lands.

Each one of us is a Ring-bearer, bound fast by our pride, our lust for power, our unaware­ness. To escape the thrall­dom of the Ring of Power we must return to the source, to the fires of Doom – the fires of greed, of anger, and of delu­sion. We must cast off all three con­ceits: the pride of superi­or­ity, the pride of inferi­or­ity, and the pride of equal­ity. We must firmly and finally resolve: ‘It is Not Mine!’