The Three Stages Of Life
“…Nietzsche and Jung on the three metamorphoses of the spirit.
There is a passage in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ in which Friedrich Nietzsche describes the spiritual evolution of man from childhood to old age.
He begins the passage by showing how a child spends his first years as a collector of duties, traumas and the word ‘No’, and how he resembles that of a camel, a beast of burden who must carry whatever is thrown onto its back.
Harry J. Stead
The child is made a camel by the dragon of society, who goes by the name of ‘Thou Shalt’, and on each of the dragon’s scales there are laws and instructions declaring what thou shalt not do.
Eventually, however, the young child will begin to question the authority of his society; he will ask why he is carrying such a heavy burden and, if he is paying attention to his surroundings, a feeling of disillusionment will set in, because he sees the dullness of the world that he has been conditioned for, he sees the consequences of his years of yielding to the dragon and he senses that he has been betrayed somehow, that what was promised to him by society has not been delivered.
Then he will notice his conditioning, all the limits and expectations that imprison him, and he will finally give way and fall to his knees, throwing the load from his back and onto the desert beneath him.
This is the first sign of maturity, referred to by Joseph Campbell as the ‘call to adventure’, and it is the stage of life when the boy sets out on his own into the desert and marches towards the great dragon of ‘Thou Shalt’.
At this moment, the young camel faces two options: Either he continues to exist as a beast of burden and allows the dragon to rule his life or, like St George and Apollo, he slays the dragon and becomes a lion, the monarch of his own kingdom:‘
Here ‘the spirit’, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, ‘becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master’…
…Now, at this point I would like to address the final threshold of life — that is, the age of atonement and of the elderly sage.
In primitive tribes, Carl Jung writes, the elderly were always the sacred guardians of common law and the guiding light for the younger generations.
…There is no happiness in fighting dragons all one’s life; one cannot live in the evening as one did in the morning.
[Old age] Jung writes, should be a celebration of what has become an opportunity for everlasting creativity, because the old man is no longer a participant in the attainment of life — for he has already achieved his life. He should let go of the things of this world and all that he has accomplished in his previous life, and he should allow himself to lower his energy, to descend within and leave the game of life to those who have yet to prove themselves.
And as he lets go, he transforms once again and returns to the world as a child, but this time he is a child with the experience of the camel and the wisdom of the lion, able to pass on wisdom to those who are at the beginning of their journey.”