13. Conclusion

We began this inquiry into King Lear by posing the question of whether the play was one of Christian sin, despair, and redemption or one that showed the unreality of all transcendent values, i.e. values beyond individual human choice and human capacities for self-deception.

The play begins with an arrogant but self-deceived king getting assurances of total devotion from two daughters, upon which he bases his plan to give them his lands and all their revenues in exchange for their support of him and one hundred knights. Like Jehovah to Eve in the Garden of Eden, he disinherits his youngest daughter for refusing to express her total devotion to him. This was a foolish, ignorant, arrogant act of jealousy, just as the Gnostics described the demiurge.

The elder daughters agree to his plan, but quickly renege when they see how disorderly the knights are and uncompromising Lear is. Walking out into a stormy night, his rage at being so abused is that of the narcissistic ego that does not get its self-image ratified; it is also that of patriarchy crumbling before the enraged feminine, and that of the Judeo-Christian god exposing its shadow. Lear’s identity has been shattered, and hid mind starts to unravel, which for him is the beginning of transformation.

A similar fate befalls Lear’s friend Gloucester. Deceived by his illegitimate son Edmund, he hunts down his legitimate son Edgar as a criminal. Then Edmund gives evidence against Gloucester, and Gloucester suffers the consequence, having his eyes put out, becoming literally like the metaphorically blind demiurge of the Gnostics. His mind remains intact, but he suffers suicidal despair. He is saved by the very son he has persecuted, Edgar, who assumes various disguises to keep his identity secret until the right time.

Alchemy and William Blake give apt imagery for these situations. Lear at the beginning is the uroborus snake of alchemy, eating its own tail, or the lion whose roar provides the heat the cooks the alchemist and his mineral kingdom Subject into transformation.In Blake, he is the demiurge Urizen, blindly caught in his own web. Cordelia is alchemical Mercury personified as the feminine-imaged Wisdom of the late additions to the Hebrew Bible. The Fool is Mercury in his masculine depiction, the one who slides into and around the consciousness of hte old King. Edgar does the same, in a different way, with Gloucester, creating illusions through which his father may pass and learn.

Lear recapitulates humanity's experience of the Tree of Knowledge, in the Gnostic and alchemical rather than orthodox Christian version. As Cardenal's religious poetry also expresses, the result is a double or duplicitous reading of orthodox texts. Lear's siding with his elder daughters is like the alchemist's biting the firt fruit off the magical tree. Lear's rage is the alchemist's heating of the King in a sweat bath or a pot of boiling water, and Blake's depiction of fiery Urizen in chains. The unraveling of Lear's consciousness is the alchemical rotting of the king in his tomb, and Urizen's or his son's floating in the watery deep. Then the naked king ascends heavenward, like the alchemical substance upside-down above the liquid in the retort. Blak has his own upside-down figure, bounding off rocks or clouds. What corresponds is the playful Lear of his "mad" scene.

Lear gets his help from a variety of sources. One is his Fool, who while exposing the foolishness also makes light of it. Lear himself begins turning his rage into jokes and so detaching from this enraging situation. A second is Cordelia, the very daughter he had thrown out, coming back to England like Sophia-Wisdom descending into our world to fix what Jehovah has wrought. She proves to be the sweet apple on the tree, whether the Biblical one ofr one depicted in alchemical illustrations. The third helper is Edgar, rags and posing as a homeless madman. From Edgar, like Jung's Jehovah conftoned with Job, Lear sees the dignity of being stripped of all that one has. Moreover, following Edgar's example, he himself can enter the realm of madness, a suspension of his narcissistic concerns.

Entering that mode, he starts to feel compassion for others; he is part of a larger whole. As the state intensifies, he sees how he always relied on flatterers for his self-image. He sees the injustices of this world, which his aroused feeling for others can apprehend, and the corruptness of its leaders. He sees the absurdity of punishment, being, as he briefly inhabits a divine space beyond reward and punishment. As Blake teachers, fear is a shackle in this world, hindering exploration of the world beyond. From this perspective Lear sees women's wombs as the entrway into a horror, a horror. Recognizing the horror further detaches him from the world, and he stands in first.amused and then awed isolation from the ups and downs of this world.He is in the space of the "friends of God" of the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, as continued by Cardenal and the mystics.

The spectator at such a drama, whether Lear's or Urizen's, has much to ponder of personal relevance. The Gnostic texts instruct us. One might reflect on one’s own demiurgic jealousy, possessiveness, rage, shortsightedness, etc., and those of the surrounding culture. Next, following Lear, one might consider ways of seeing suffering and humiliation as opportunities for self-knowledge and greater sense of connection to other. Finally, one might make oneself open to opportunities for transcending such self-concerns altogether, opening oneself to laughter and also to illumination from outside the ego's world, which as "the mystery of things" may or may not be external to one's personality as a whole.

Bosch and Blake captured this world in art. Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights shows a release from the Law of this world, however necessary it may be on another level, a release through the play and uniting of opposites. Blake's Milton shows a similar shedding of the Law, visualzied as shedding one's clothes, toward a life of imagination. On the opposite side, desire in the physical sense, untransformed by imagination, can fetter the spirit, as we see in Blake's depictions of Vala and Rintrah, and which Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur also shows us. The Gnostics taught the same. Yet Lear's calumny against women is really the awareness of how desire can bind humanity of both genders. The Internal feminine image, for a man, can be the agent of liberation as well as of bondage, as Lear's Cordelia, Blake's Jerusalem, and the alchemists' feminine personifications of Mercury illustrate.

All of this has much in common with Christian allegory, yet as such it goes against orthodoxy. The saviors are human, yet with an aura of the divine. But their divinity is more like the Gnostic Christ than the orthodox one, and the faults that lead to calamity are precisely those of the god of Genesis. At the same time we may interpret the aura of transcendence found here in psychological terms: it is a drama about the evils inherent in an ego that acknowledges no power greater than it, and of the salvation that comes of a connection to the Self, an inner transcendence of the ego’s realm.