2. The Land of Shadow
When they have the gate of the Tower of Cirith Ungol behind them, Sam cries out: “Run, Mr. Frodo!” The next instant he shouts: “No, not that way! There’s a sheer drop over the wall. Follow me!”
Sam is thus urging Frodo to run, as if he would not otherwise have done so, with the crashing gate, the clanging bell of Cirith Ungol and the Nazgûl’s arrival with a hideous scream behind them. Yet while Sam hastens along the path to the side, Frodo begins to run straight ahead toward a precipice, toward his death in the dark abyss…! What is happening?
We have specific thoughts about this, but would first like to recall the two earlier scenes in which Frodo ran blindly. The first time was in the Old Forest in connection with the encounter with Old Woman Willow, which was the Terrible Mother’s first concrete appearance in the tale. The second time was when he fled from Shelob, Her most dreadful and explicit manifestation – Frodo ran blindly while Sam stopped and reflected. Now, when Frodo emerges from Cirith Ungol, Her stronghold, he once again runs blindly. It is clear that Frodo panics when the Terrible Mother comes too close, which is natural and perhaps even healthy. At the same time, he has his Sam, an inner, grounded instinct that makes the impulse to flee blindly transitory.
In this scene, however, he is not fleeing the Terrible Mother personified. He has her stronghold behind him, together with the vultures and the Nazgûl, but she does not attack him in monstrous form as Old Woman Willow and Shelob did. Instead, the blind panic arises from the fact that he finds himself under the immediate threat of the Terrible Mother while wearing her attire; he is not himself but embodies Mordor as he steps into the realm of shadow in his orc rags. In this “form” he lacks protection against the Terrible Mother’s influence and, as the very first thing he does, runs straight toward the abyss, the nothingness she has all along tried to drag him down into.
As mentioned, he is not wearing only orc rags, but also an orcish mail shirt, and above all an orc helmet with the Red Eye on the brow. We must now also take special note of the fact that the helmet, as was made clear in the narrative in the preceding chapter, has a “beak.” The text reads: “… the Evil Eye was painted in red above the beaklike nose-guard.” Why is Frodo, according to the tale, equipped with such a helmet, of all conceivable headgear? Headgear represents “something that takes possession of the head,”[1] that is, the wearer’s attitude or identity. When Frodo enters Mordor, he does so, in other words, as if he belongs to the realm of shadow; or put differently: he enters Mordor because he belongs to this domain just as much as, for example, Lothlórien. Thus he does not enter the realm of shadow with the attributes of the Good Mother, Galadriel’s phial, nor with his father’s distinguishing blade; but with the attributes of the Terrible Mother: orc rags, eye, and beak. He has been forced to give up the silvery mithril mail at the border of Mordor, and Sam still carries both the phial and the sword.
This beak is no coincidence. Only three times do beaks occur in the tale, and all three in relation to the Mother. When Galadriel comes sailing on her swan-boat, its golden beak is described in particular as shining like polished gold; Shelob’s venom-dripping beak is mentioned repeatedly in the encounter with her; and we have discussed the likewise unexpected beak on the Witch-king’s winged monster.
Frodo’s helmet thus bears the attributes of both Sauron and the Terrible Mother when he, as the very first thing he does in Mordor, runs toward the abyss as if he has lost all sense. Once again it is only thanks to the irreplaceable Sam that Frodo is not swallowed up. While Frodo in Mordor wears, so to speak, his shadow’s garb, he still has the light-bearing Sam, his down-to-earth instinct, as guide and saviour.
One may view Frodo’s impulse to run toward the precipice either as an expression of the Terrible Mother’s striving to devour him – with the beaked helmet on his head he is in her power. But one may also see it as an outburst of emotional resistance to accepting the unbearable state of things, that is, as an expression of the death drive. He is overcome by the desire to die in order to make everything disappear – and thus rushes blindly toward the abyss. Finally, one might speculate whether it is not precisely this longing that is also the archetype he is trying to flee from.
As they hurry onward from Cirith Ungol, Frodo says that they must get off the road. “But that can’t be done,” says Sam firmly, “not without wings.” Here too we see a hint that Frodo, who has until now been the authority in their relationship, has lost his leading position in relation to Sam, who in turn assumes this role. That Frodo wears orc rags and a beaked helmet while Sam bears the attributes of the Good Mother and the Good Father symbolizes this relationship.
Soon, as they have feared, enemies appear along the road, and they jump down from a bridge and land in thorn bushes. They continue along a dry riverbed. Frodo discards the mail shirt and puts on his Elven cloak again, beneath the “rags.” This seems to strengthen him, for with this transformation (which a change of clothes often represents) he reverts to being “Mr. Frodo.”
As they make their way into Mordor they sense the light in the south. It spreads; a struggle is going on in the sky between the light and the dark, underscoring the cosmic conflict of which Frodo has become a part. “The wind has turned,” says Sam, as Mordor’s clouds are driven back. This may symbolize the approach of King Elessar, but also consciousness entering the realm of shadow together with Frodo.
But Frodo cannot take pleasure in anything. He complains that the Ring is so heavy, and then he says: “I have begun to see it before me all the time, like a great wheel of fire.” This is the first time the burning wheel is mentioned. If the burning wheel had been mentioned only here, in passing, we might have judged it to be a temporary simile—“the Ring feels like a wheel of fire.” But this specific image recurs explicitly in the next chapter. As mentioned, the Ring, and thus also the Eye (or vice versa), is replaced by the wheel as the primary symbol in, or of, Mordor. At the same time, all three images are prisms of the same symbol, which is underscored by Frodo’s words: I have begun to see the Ring as a wheel – that is to say, “I now see the central symbol in a different way; it now has a content of which I was previously unaware.”
It is noteworthy that the wheel appears precisely here, during the first stretch in Mordor, where Frodo and Sam walk up and down, up and down over mountain ridges. We recognize the image from the Barrow-downs, where the road from the Father’s house to the initiation in the burial mound involved a repeated going up and down (over ridges), until the hobbits came to the circular hollow with a stone in the middle – the site of the initiation’s beginning. This round, concave place with the stone at its center was a first expression of the wheel symbol. The wheel represented, as we touched on then (even though we did not use the word “wheel”), the tension and/or union of the opposites “above” and “below,” which can be understood in different ways depending on context: as heaven and earth (e.g. Christ as God and as man), or as conflict/union between consciousness and the unconscious (e.g. Frodo/the ego in relation to Gollum/the shadow). The drawing together of otherwise irreconcilable opposites, the concave circle with the obelisk at its center, was hinted at by the fact that mist enveloped the place. The mist, through its dissolution of distinctions (which enables consciousness’s encounter with otherworldly beings, spirits, monsters, and so forth – “the other”), can indeed have a potentially unifying effect. At that stage, however, the core of the symbol was not yet at issue; the experience of its periphery was sufficient.
The wheel’s circulation reinforces the symbol (above and below, respectively) with the insight that “that which is above is also below”; that is to say, the opposites are not, with this symbol, definitively separated and static. In our tale, the relationship between the perceived opposites could be represented by the saga’s recurring mirrorings: such as the aforementioned obelisk on the concave hill, on the one hand, and Orthanc in the vale of Isengard, on the other; Tom Bombadil’s eye in the circle of the golden Ring, and Sauron’s eye surrounded by fire; the underworld in the form of the Barrow-downs, Moria, the Paths of the Dead, and Shelob’s lair, all of which lead to initiation; the still lake of Moria, the Mirror Lake on the other side of the mountain, and Galadriel’s Mirror; the spiritualization of Gandalf and Aragorn, on the one hand, and that of the Nazgûl, on the other; the Shire’s flourishing party tree and Minas Tirith’s dead tree, and so on. While one is below (e.g. the hole at the roots of the devouring tree) and the other above (e.g. Galadriel’s dwelling in the tree canopy), the spinning of the wheel binds them together and, in this context (Mordor), produces a lack of the distinction upon which consciousness has hitherto relied. What exists in the Good Mother also exists in the Terrible Mother, and vice versa (as Galadriel hinted in her vision of what she would become if she took the Ring). With this rule, and together with the now-revealed wheel, we must conclude that these are mirror images in a circulation.
We have sensed the symbolism of the wheel in the spiral we discussed on an earlier occasion, which we then noted moves round and round with recurring images until we reach its center – in our new, clarified context: the hub of the wheel. The insight we imagine to be growing in Frodo as he approaches the hub, Mount Doom, is, however, largely unconscious and unbearable to consciousness. Because Frodo does not yet understand the symbol, it presses in upon him and torments him. It “wants” to be integrated into his consciousness while Frodo tries to fend it off. The entire saga, like the process of individuation, is about painful conflicts. They cannot be nullified but only endured consciously, so that meaningful suffering may replace pointless or “neurotic” suffering.[2]
The central mirror image for Frodo has been the appearance of the Eye in Galadriel’s Mirror. Not only does he see evil in the center of the Good Mother, but Frodo himself is also the eye of the saga in his capacity as the consciousness of the story. We discussed in the previous commentary how the eye as a symbol primarily represents precisely this. The eye of the ego is confronted, as we mentioned, with the eye of the unconscious. The wheel binds these together, and, like the movement up and down – or, to reconnect with an earlier discussion, descensus and ascensus – it constitutes an autonomous attempt at a union of opposites. As a consequence of this archetypal, autonomous striving, the wheel recurs within the alchemical tradition, where the “work” or opus was called circulare or rota (the wheel).[3] One may assume that at this stage Frodo experiences a growing awareness of the respective gazes, which is why the Eye is no longer an autonomous symbol in Mordor; but since he is still relatively unconscious of their relation to one another, the wheel replaces the Eye, since it, as stated, expresses precisely the striving for the union of these opposites – the eye/consciousness of the ego and the eye/unconsciousness of the other. (Here the respective eyes could, in a more general sense, be expressed as insight into the relationship between the ego and the Self.)
This revealed relationship constitutes an unbearable conflict for the ego, which is expressed by the fact that the wheel burns. The burning wheel is, namely, “a figurative expression for a catastrophic revolt of all the original components of the psyche, a conflagration resembling panic or some other uncontrollable, and hence fatal outburst of emotion,” says Jung.[4]
We conclude this excursus on the burning wheel by noting that, within alchemy, it corresponds to Mercurius (the central figure of the opus itself), who “himself is the ‘fiery wheel of the essence’ in the form of a serpent,”[5] since this leads us to the uroboros, which is the next prism of the same symbol. We will, however, refrain from pursuing that for the moment and return to the narrative.
As we have touched upon earlier, after reading the novel this far one would surely have expected Mordor – ”murderland”, ”motherland” – to represent death pure and simple; a sterile Hades with spectres and perhaps strange monsters. But “Mordor is not wholly dead,” the author informs us, and just as light is glimpsed in the sky, there are bushes here, small trees, little trickles of water, small pools. When they rest and Sam keeps watch, he contemplates a white twinkling star in the sky for a while, and then goes to sleep beside Frodo instead of keeping watch over him. In other words, he feels, for the moment, safe in Mordor. As all who have read the trilogy know, Mordor is in large part nightmarish, that is true, but it is evidently not one-sidedly so – it is, as said, ambivalent.
We have spoken of the Eye as “Mordor from without,” the pseudo-consciousness that peers out from the darkness of the unconscious that Mordor represents. Now the story tells us that “the Eye [is] turned inward,” “brooding.” According to the narrative, this is due to “the messages that had sown doubt and fear.” It is the return of the king, the renewed attitude of the ego, that causes the Eye to withdraw in brooding reflection; with this new attitude in consciousness, the attitude of the unconscious changes correspondingly. Aragorn’s transformation into King Elessar in the sphere of consciousness expresses the process of change that Frodo’s journey in the underworld potentially leads to. Viewed symbolically, the withdrawal of the Eye may be a consequence of Frodo’s entry into, and thus illumination of, the darkness. Not once, as we have noted, does the Eye appear while Frodo wanders through Mordor;[6] instead, together with the Ring, it is once again replaced by the burning Wheel – a transformation in the underworld that thus corresponds to the transformation in “the world of men.”
But everything is still in potentia; everything hangs by a thin thread. The narrative allows us to understand this by having the king’s host march toward the final decision, the Black Gate, with the understanding that the powers of darkness are immensely stronger and that victory is contingent upon Frodo’s transformation. Consciousness cannot “win” through war against the unconscious, but may, at this stage, be able to hold the rebellion of the unconscious at bay while the process of transformation continues in the underworld.
Footnotes
[1] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 53. (Italics in original.)
[2] See e.g., Jung, ”The Development of Personality”, CW 17, par. 154.
[3] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 404.
[4] Jung, Aion, par. 212.
[5] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 215.
[6] On one occasion, the Eye manifests as Frodo stumbles toward Mount Doom, but it is then portrayed "as if" it were threatening Frodo, seen from Sam's viewpoint.