The Fall of Numenor...

I mean America

I’ve been reading/listening to The Fall of Númenor, a collection of writings by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited together initially by Christopher Tolkien and then finished by Brian Sibley. It’s an incredible read/listen (books on tape are the best!! Yes, please force me to listen to some eloquent British man telling me tales of Middle-earth). I’ve recently finished The Silmarillion, and I am currently reading The Hobbit in Hungarian to get better at my mother tongue language skills. But before hopping back into The LOTR trilogy, I decided should side quest into all of these other collections that Christopher Tolkien masterfully curated and edited together, along with the other writings of J.R.R. himself.

The Fall of Numenor is told in The Silmarillion, but this work fills out all of the details and includes several stories added in from Unfinished Tales to really flesh it out. I can’t recommend it enough if you are as much of a Tolkien nerd as I. Reading Tolkien makes me want to be a better person. I want to aspire to being an elf, an eternal being who has seen the light of Valinor but chooses to love, live, and tend the beautiful world of Middle-earth, with all of its heartache, death, and difficulty. I want to walk straight and serene, and be wise in the face of chaos. I also want to wear long, draping dresses, have my hair long, adorn myself with Noldorin jewels, and pretend that my house is the sanctuary of Rivendell where I can romp around with my Hobbit son and bake lembas bread all day long. You know, as you do.

Anyway, if you don’t have an immediate recall of what the story is of The Fall of Númenor, I will do a very short recap.

There was a huge war where all the powers of Valinor, the good “gods,” came in to fight against Morgoth, the ultimate bad “god.” All the elves were on the good guy side, and some humans also joined in league with the elves to defeat the ultimate Baddy McBad. The good guys triumphed in victory, and Morgoth himself was cast into the ethers outside of the world. The good guys rewarded the humans who had fought with them with their own fancy island raised out of the ocean that the humans called Númenor.

The people of Númenor were gifted with long life, spanning hundreds of years, and they spent their time pursuing knowledge, the arts, and a variety of crafts. But as the generations elapsed, the kings began to grow restless. Living to be 400 years old wasn’t enough, and they began to resent the elves, who live forever, and the Valar, the good “gods” who gave them these gifts in the first place. The atmosphere was ripe for exploitation, and sure enough, it happened.

Sauron, whom I hope I don’t have to explain, through a series of events, sweet-talked his way to become the most trusted advisor of the king. Before long, they were burning the faithful on altars created to worship Morgoth. Why? Because people forget. They forget their history, and when they get itchy in their abundance, they start creating problems for themselves, and they end up doing the exact thing their fore-fathers fought so hard to liberate them from.

Sound familiar? Tolkien got this so right. Like, so right. Look around us. We have never had a more abundant time in our humankind’s history, and what are we doing with it? We let it be hoarded by people who already have too much, and there are more and more people ending up on the streets, homeless. We allowed someone into power who very clearly outlined his authoritarian agenda, and we are days away from his planned birthday military parade, and all of the No Kings protests speaking out against it. This country, America, was literally founded by people who wanted to escape monarchy and set up a more “equal” system of government. The Revolutionary War was fought to get out of this exact same authoritarian principle. And a majority of people voted that back into power. To be blunt, we are metaphorically kissing Morgoth’s ass.

The Númenorians, in their hubris, set sail to attack the deathless lands of Valinor, the home of the good “gods.” But enough was enough. Chasms opened up and swallowed the fleet into the abyss of the ocean. Númenor sank into the sea. The world was rendered asunder and bent to become a sphere, removing the land of the gods into a separate plane of existence. It’s Tolkien’s Atlantis myth. The whole mess just got swallowed by the ocean, and the world was utterly and irreversibly changed.

Not that I think America will literally be swallowed by the ocean, although with rising sea levels, there may be a not-too-distant future where our coastline is very different, heaven forbid. But each week, there is a ratcheting up of oversteps, boundary pushing, and ever-increasing political hubris. The current stand-off between Gavin Newsom and Trump, the protests erupting all over the country against the deportation and human trafficking of anyone with brown skin, the handcuffing and assalt of Senator Alex Padilla, and Lord knows, whatever is going to happen this weekend, it just feels like we are reaching some kind of critical tipping point. (As I write this, the headlines keep coming, and Israel attacked Iran. Fuuuuuuuck.)

Because of our collective historical forgetfulness, we are setting into motion a series of events that are going to reorder the world. Things will not look like they have or what they do even now, and the astrological alignments happening right now and over the next several years point heavily in this direction too.

There were some survivors of the faithful, the ancestors of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, king of Gondor and Arnor, who survived the cataclysms and made it to Middle-earth to start again. Whatever happens, time moves on, and hope is not lost even in the darkest of times. The last time I read The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings was during the COVID shutdowns. I needed a sense of truth, stability, heroism, compassion, love, kindness, and the sweeping story to buffer my reality and give me context for the world around me. I am needing it again. If we lived in a traditional society, these kinds of times are what our myths would be for, but Tolkien’s works are as close to our Western civilization’s myths as we can get, so I will use them as such.

I guess then this is my recommendation to you. Lean into our myths, our stories, and our Tolkien during these troubling and uncertain times. They are more relevant now than they have been for a long time. They can inspire you to be better, know your worth and your truth, call us to act in the ways that we can and will, and give us hope for a better tomorrow.

P.S. I also find listening to Soundbaths before bed really helpful. Here’s the one I’m listening to right now as I write.

Love you all. If you are protesting out there this weekend, stay safe. My love is with you.

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Parrot Tarot

I am working on creating the art for the back of the cards. Here’s the progress above. I decided to make the central image a parrot’s eye, and it is in fact, Mr. Sam’s eye. As the Magus card, he is the ruler of this deck, since this deck will be used for magic, divination, and spiritual introspection, as all tarot decks are used. He oversees the magical workings and blesses them with his far vision.

As far as the Kickstarter launch, I had really hoped to have the Preview page up and running by now. But I got indispensable feedback from none other than Tami Simon, founder of Sounds True publishing, and I have to do some reworking of my video. It’s like that sometimes. Someone comes in and says the thing from an angle I haven’t considered and it is exactly correct and true and it cannot be ignored. If you’ve ever seen or heard any of her interviews, that’s what she is best at pointing to and inquiring about, the heart of the matter and truth bombs like that should not be glossed over. I am forced to think bigger and broader and the project will be better for it even if my initial timeline is going to be a bit different than I had hoped.

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Mandalas and This Jungian Life Podcast

I have been a huge fan of This Jungian Life Podcast for years now. I rarely miss their weekly episodes. There was an opportunity to call in and ask a question about Mandalas for their upcoming episode, so of course, I jumped at that chance. I have wondered for years what the difference is between the very crystalline and structured mandalas and the type where it’s a more organic narrative style of images within a circle. Both from my own mandala vision, which was of the highly ordered type, to teaching Alligator Lizards for years and working with the more narrative mandala style, I’ve had this question rolling around in my mind for a long time.

My question was answered on the podcast! Listen to the whole episode, because it is so worth it, but at 43 minutes, yours truly can be heard asking her question! The answer they give is fire. Mind blown.

https://thisjungianlife.com/mandala-archetype/

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