3. Mount Doom I
The second half of the previous chapter, “The Land of Shadow”, tells how the hobbits see massive orc camps they must avoid. (These are likened to “insect nests”, as if to illustrate dissolution.) They hide from scouts and later Sam discovers a sneaking Gollum who slips away. Frodo and Sam are eventually forced to join a hurrying horde of orcs, but manage to escape in connection with a commotion. Then they begin the journey eastward toward Mount Doom, through a desert-like landscape. The journey is long and grim.
The geography is worth noting: Orodruin, Mount Doom, stands with a slight skewness on a plateau (almost) enclosed by mountains (twice over, see map of Mordor); just as the shadow-land itself is (almost) surrounded by a mountain range. We have here a third variant of the circle with an upward-striving “hub” in the middle, after the obelisk at the Barrow-downs and Orthanc in Isengard. Each time the symbol recurs it has grown considerably in size, but also changed in character as an image. In Mordor it is no longer symmetrical, but rather disturbed. This is in accordance with our understanding of Mordor’s ambivalence – it is neither one thing nor the other; there is nothing so to speak neat and easily comprehensible here, nothing that appeals to either eros or logos – it is neither yin nor yang. Another central difference between the symbol in Mordor and outside, is that we here do not have a phallic structure in the middle, but the feminine mountain with its likewise feminine cave to the lava stream in its interior. Considering the saga’s central theme, a feminine hub is to be expected. But where then is the famous Black Tower, Mordor’s masculine center? Well, it is strangely pushed aside; it stands as it were to the side in relation to the central mother-symbol toward which Frodo, driven by necessity, strives. The Barad-dûr that outside Mordor is perceived as the hub for all the world’s evil, is like the Eye – yes, Sauron himself – something rather peripheral in Mordor. This too illustrates the difference between the distinction that applies outside the land of shadow and the obscurity that applies in the land. When the symbol of evil first appears before consciousness the matter is clear: In the land of shadow stands a black tower with an evil man who wants to take over the world. One can say that it is the ego’s interpretation of the state of things, or of the symbol’s nature and content. But during the course of the journey the understanding begins to change. The black riders are not simply evil men who have become wraiths in Sauron’s service, but they have features of insects, snakes and do not use violence like former warriors, but paralyze, ensnare and frighten; that is, when the initial image of them has developed with experience another content is revealed – The Terrible Mother. In the end the Witch-king rides a serpentine and vulture-like monster and screams like a banshee. According to the saga it is not at all about the great warriors of old that Frodo understood them as in the Shire, so much as The Terrible Mother’s nightmares – Hecate’s horrors rather than a warlord’s warriors. We have also seen how the Witch-king himself could not defeat a woman and a hobbit in his first close combat, but was destroyed himself. In a corresponding way we now see in Mordor that it is not at all Sauron, The great warlord, who is the enemy; but he is merely part of a larger dynamic, which is not particularly active here in the land of shadow.
This environment with mountain ranges, cave and tower was preceded by Cirith Ungol, which was mentioned when the hobbits arrived there. Mordor is the only environment or image that unites tower and mountain with cave. This is yet another hint at the domain’s both/and character in opposition to either/or, while at the same time the image’s lack of balance and symmetry – and, of course, decidedly negative quality – suggests that this is not about the union of opposites at a high level. We maintain that Mordor is a primordial state that from the outside, but not in itself, is assumed to have distinction in the form of a central great black tower with an influential evil man, and an eye that stares out from the darkness. In reality Mordor in itself is rather massa confusa, the original chaos, which to some extent is only separated into distinguishable parts with the entry of Frodo, the Bearer.
As mentioned, we maintain that uroboros is a suitable symbol for Mordor, especially as Erich Neumann describes it.[1][2] Uroboros – the serpent or dragon that bites its own tail and thereby forms a circle – is a very ancient symbol that became central in the alchemical tradition. According to Neumann, uroboros symbolizes the original primal state where the opposites have not yet been separated from each other; “the original whole” that the mother archetype in let’s say its deepest form represents. Because the feminine and masculine as uroboros are not separated, the mother archetype obtains masculine features, as we have occasionally seen in our saga (for example Shelob’s horn and sting).
Uroboros is both devouring and birthing, the destructive that simultaneously possesses the seeds of creativity,[3] just as Mordor is chaos and darkness that is broken through by opening sky, glimmering star and trickles of drinkable water. In the primal state there is nothing but at the same time it is everything – there prevails total unconsciousness, but thus has potential for consciousness (as we shall see in the saga). When the spark of consciousness is awakened with the potential to become an individual, uroboros reacts with its devouring recoil. We recognize this mythological motif from The Mother who kills her son or lover. In our saga we have seen how Frodo was led straight to the lulling, suffocating, devouring tree when he had left the Shire (unconscious symbiosis with The Mother) and entered the unknown and begun his journey toward individuation. We have also become acquainted with The Terrible Mother in her most explicit form, Shelob, who eats the male she mates with and greedily devours her own offspring – she too paralyzing and devouring. It is uroboros that tries to pull the glimmering consciousness back down into the darkness, to the “nothingness” that has recurred in the saga. As we have mentioned several times, it is precisely this that constantly threatens Frodo – never men with drawn blades, as one might have expected from a fantasy novel. (The only time anyone tried to kill Frodo with weapons he proved to be immune to it, in the mines of Moria.)
Frodo’s terrible challenge is that he with open eyes must meet this threat – he must go straight into Mordor. Once the call and the insight have been awakened through the daemon-Gandalf this is his fate – to as a conscious individual confront the darkness and break the bond. He knows that if he stays with his ring or tries to flee his calling the darkness creeps up on him and pulls him unconscious “back to Mordor”, in one way or another. The Ring and Mount Doom are Frodo’s fate and he can only choose how he will handle this – conscious confrontation or unconscious avoidance (which the ”invisibility ring” to a high degree represents during the first part of the narrative). But when Frodo breaks free, a counter-reaction immediately follows – first Hecate’s wraiths and then the devouring tree, and thereafter a series of corresponding manifestations of The Terrible Mother. The Mordor to which he is to be pulled back is the unconscious primal state, against which consciousness is a transgression. The alchemists' "work" is like individuation, in a sense, opus contra naturam. While “nature” wants to pull us back to the darkness, the impulse toward consciousness is also “natural”. Jung maintains that this paradox is a consequence of both instincts originating from the same libido-source. “Man’s instincts are not all harmoniously arranged”, as he says.[4] The call is a manifestation of a conflict.
The conscious man inevitably finds himself in a conflict, which the unconscious man does not know. Frodo’s conflict is unbearable, while the Shire-folk he left behind live their lives harmoniously as if the War of the Ring was not raging. Frodo follows his inner, originally unconscious impulse to individuate, while at the same time the unconscious attempts to extinguish this light. A war rages within him as he confronts the darkness. (We shall see that Frodo’s inner world is mirrored in the outer; his adventure disturbs the Shire’s circles.)
The threat Frodo meets is ultimately manifested as uroboros, the unconscious primal state that begins to writhe when he enters Mordor. In the desert-like landscape he is now stumbling through there is no distinction, for example no creatures, nothing particularly discernible. “As the symbol of the origin and of the opposites contained in it, [uroboros] is the ‘Great Round’”, says Neumann; a state where everything is undifferentiated.[5] Consequently, one wants to say, the saga is about the ring. The entire adventure is indeed about making one’s way from the unconscious, symbiotic state and breaking the bond in order to become a conscious individual – the small light that makes all the difference in the world. This rather insignificant thing symbolizes the infinite uroboros, according to the symbolic principle that the small is also the great.[6] Frodo is the bearer of the primal state, its opposite individuation, and the universal, life-determining conflict between these contradictory, natural drives.
The Ring is the fate and the bondage to the “circulating” process that the alchemists called “wheel”, rota. Together with the previous discussion, these circumstances and the images that represent them make it consequent that the wheel becomes the central symbol in Mordor, in this uroboric landscape, which in turn is “the whole”, “everything” (in potentia). In his discussion of Böhme’s vision Jung says:
The wheel appears here as a concept for wholeness which represents the essence of mandala symbolism [wholeness] and therefore includes the 'mysterium iniquitatis.'[7]
Mysterium iniquitatis can be translated as "the mystery of evil". According to Jung, wholeness necessarily includes evil if it contains goodness.[8] Given that our saga as a whole also constitutes a wholeness, it must, while it begins in The Good Mother's bosom or primal state, lead to The Terrible Mother's darkness and a confrontation with the mystery of evil; and its grand finale ought to describe a both/and, the uroboros from which the opposites originate. It becomes a necessity. The wheel is indeed also a well-known symbol for fate itself. We recognize it from the "wheel of Fortune", rota Fortunae, which is a remnant of Fortuna as goddess of fate in her original form. Her attributes were originally the rudder, to illustrate how she steers the ship we travel in, or an orb, which presumably represented the uncertainty of direction.[9] (We are perhaps reminded of the palantír, a central part of Aragorn's fate, whose symbolic similarities to the ring we have already touched upon.)
Fate and necessity are recurring in the saga and we have thus discussed these themes previously. Symbols of The Mother have many times manifested with the spider motif; for example similar descriptions of spider webs in the hedge that leads to the Old Forest and The Terrible Mother respectively the bushes in the Rivendell, The Good Mother's domain. Primarily the spider motif is negative. Galadriel has been likened to a weaver of spider webs and sorceress by those who are suspicious of her; Gollum is likened to a spider when Frodo and Sam see him for the first time; Shelob paralyzes and binds Frodo with her thread. In our dreams, the spider often appears as a symbol of "the negative fate", that is, a fate one is not aware of or does not want to know about because it goes against the ego's attitude; a circumstance that leads to fate ensnaring one and one becomes unwittingly caught in it like a fly in a spider web.[10] One might consider that Frodo after the encounter with Shelob, the transformation in the tower and the orc rags, has moved past the resistance to this symbol, which is why the image of fate is now a wheel instead of a web. The state of things is admittedly unbearable (the fire), but more consciously so, according to the discussion above. While the spider monster and its web are decidedly negative, the wheel in itself has a more neutral and more composite meaning in the potential union of opposites, for example. The wheel as symbol is something Frodo must integrate, or "own", which he will also do, as we shall see.
The journey across the plateau toward the volcano at its center is difficult. When Sam looks out over the landscape he understands that they will never return home. For Frodo this has been given, but Sam has insisted that it probably can happen, after all. But now he realizes that they cannot possibly make it out of Mordor again, if for no other reason than that they lack provisions – they have barely enough to reach Mount Doom.
It is when Frodo has collapsed and fallen asleep that Sam begins to reason with himself. The inner dialogue is interesting for two reasons. Partly it reminds of how Gollum's inner conflict was manifested in a dialogue. An inner voice comes to Sam and says "Don't be a fool, Sam Gamgee." The voice challenges the optimism Sam wants to maintain, with fatalism: "It's all quite useless ... you'll die just the same." One is reminded, as mentioned, of how Gollum strikes down on Sméagol's naivety, his hope. We should not draw too much from this, but one can with the shadow's verbalization assume a vague dissolution of Sam's attitude, which gives room for "the other" within himself. The unconscious adopts in short a compensating attitude to that of consciousness. Sam's shadow instills hopelessness, while he always has supported Frodo with his hopefulness. Even Sam is affected by uroboros, and opposites previously unknown to him emerge.
The second reason why this inner dialogue is worth noting is that Sam twice mentions Rosie Cotton. He wishes he could see her again. One can speculate that this too is a consequence of the vague loosening of the ego-attitude. Rosie has never been mentioned before in the saga. Sam's eros, emotion-based relational function, has been directed exclusively toward Frodo (and the horse Bill); but here in the "hermaphroditic" uroboros[11] not only does the shadow rise to the surface, but also the anima (which Rosie represents for Sam). Sure enough, Sam will marry her when they are back in the Shire, but we think it is noteworthy that the first time she is mentioned is in Mordor, of all places. If we adhere strictly to the text and read it with a symbolic eye, it is only now – as a consequence of uroboros – that she becomes a conscious figure; she appears so to speak here for the first time in the saga. We can in connection with this remind ourselves of the environment's hermaphroditic features, with the volcano and the tower respectively that are connected to each other via the ring/uroboros.
Sam’s expanded consciousness is illustrated later in another way, and we wish to emphasize that it is Sam and not Frodo who experiences this. As Sam dozes, dream and reality begin to merge (in itself an image of dissolution) and he sees points of light like gloating eyes, sees crawling figures, hears sounds of wild beasts and tormented cries – hellish impressions to be expected in Mordor. He starts and sits up, seeing only the dark world around him as he stares into the void. But he still sees pale lights like eyes. We shall not return to the symbolism of the eye, but we note the return of pale eyes in the darkness, which we recognize from Gollum and Shelob. (That the eyes are perceived as malevolent may be a result of Sam’s fear and negative expectation; in themselves they may be neutral.) What we wish to emphasize here is precisely the presence of unknown eyes as lights in the darkness of Mordor, which gives us a further image of the light of nature, lumen naturae, which we first had reason to reflect upon when the fox observed the three sleeping hobbits in the Shire. The fox thought it was “queer,” and we spoke then of the fox as a traditional symbol of the light of nature – that is, the unconscious’s sparks (scintillae) of independent consciousness.[12] Jung quotes the alchemical treatise Aurora consurgens in a way that is strikingly apt for us regarding the “sparks” of Mordor: ”Know that the foul earth quickly receives the whites sparks.”[13] According to the alchemists, these were ”seeds of light broadcast in the chaos,” Jung maintains. It was primarily this image we had in mind when we previously suggested that the uroboros is the primal state containing seeds of consciousness; a consciousness that can form into an individual, autonomous in relation to the circle, seeking his own path – which, as we have noted several times, gives rise to a regressive counter-reaction in the form of ensnaring, paralyzing, and devouring.
Of course, Frodo’s decision to leave the symbiosis with the Mother in his hole under the ground in order to break the bond symbolized by the Ring is not the same as the sparks in Mordor. Rather, what occurs before Sam’s eyes as his consciousness expands in the encounter with and reception of the contents of the unconscious, is that he becomes aware that in the darkness there are sparks independent of him, which reflect his gaze and can represent a potential integration of the soul in this wasteland (compare the Eye in Galadriel’s mirror). This, then, is the reason why Rosie, his anima, comes to him as an image he begins to long for, since the anima is in some sense synonymous with the soul itself.[14] This union does not, of course, take place in Mordor, but the idea glimmers, is brought to life in this landscape of hopelessness. Perhaps one could say that had Sam not completed this journey through the desert and encountered the image of Rosie, the book would not have ended with them marrying and starting a family – simply because it was here, of all places, that she came to him.
As the journey takes an ever-increasing toll on the hobbits, Sam offers to carry the Ring for Frodo. It grows steadily heavier while Frodo becomes increasingly despairing and exhausted. Frodo reacts with anger, but then admits: “I am almost in its power now.” He finds himself once more in the underworld and faces the risk – a threat ever-present from the Old Man Willow to Mordor – of vanishing into its nothingness. The Ring, Sauron, Mordor, and the dark side of the Mother Archetype merge into an uroboric state where each is also the other.
Preparing for the final stretch, they discard everything they no longer need, including the Orc-gear. To Mount Doom, Frodo carries neither the Orc-rags, the mithril-coat, Sting, nor Galadriel’s phial – all the attributes he has acquired since leaving the Shire shed from him, as it were, as he traverses Mordor, likely because they are too distinct for this environment.
Sam is again haunted by memories; perhaps a form of regression akin to the one in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, where he, in his hopelessness, began to sing an improvised song of beautiful things. He asks Frodo if he remembers Ithilien – that rabbit they ate and the sun-warmed slope where they rested. But while Frodo knows these things happened, he is entirely devoid of emotional memory. He cannot recall warmth, scents, or the wind, and he cannot evoke the image of moon or star. This lack of perception illustrates the dissolution of his purely human faculties, as if he were on the verge of becoming a wraith. “I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.”
We recently spoke of how Frodo loses his attributes as he enters the realm of shadow—an image now reinforced by his nakedness. In connection with Cirith Ungol we made a brief digression on the symbolic value of nakedness in the tale—how it is associated with initiation, with death and rebirth. Everything Frodo experiences now deep within the uroboros is the wheel of fire. Influenced by alchemy Böhme writes: “The fashioning of birth is a spinning wheel which Mercurius makes in sulphur.”[15] As we noted it is as if Frodo loses his bodily senses and instead is transfixed by the burning circle. Together with his nakedness we can expect a rebirth in spirit in accordance with Böhme’s quote. An alchemist quoted by Jung says: “Let the spirit which is fire go out of the body.”[16] The overpowering wheel is a symbol of Frodo’s Self which seeks to be born in spirit as the rota nativivitus (the wheel of birth) with all the pain that birth entails. Since classical times it has been repeated that the soul is the round which like the anima mundi (or here Mercurius) rotates around a hub.[18] The term the Self which is central in this context always contains opposites which is why the rotating wheel according to our previous discussion is a symbol of precisely this. One can summarize it by saying that the Self seeks to be born in Frodo, to be realized through him, so that Frodo may manifest his true self. This meets with resistance in Frodo because it means that he himself “dies” – which is why the wheel as mentioned is experienced as overwhelming. “The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego,” as Jung says.[19]
The journey continues into its final stage. The mountain trembles, a storm approaches and clouds of smoke darken the sky. The uroboros is in upheaval as the Bearer reaches Mount Doom. Frodo can no longer walk and begins to crawl instead as if he is finally succumbing. Even this becomes too difficult. Sam carries him. But as the slope steepens he too is forced down on all fours, crawling with Frodo on his back like a pack animal. This scene can also be interpreted as a continuous loss of the individual human element as well as the mother archetype’s pull toward the earth and the underworld. Ever since the Shire crawling has been an expression of the influence of the Terrible Mother, as we have seen many times.
They are on their way to the heart of Mount Doom where Sauron forged the Ring long ago. Symbolically Sauron, the Ring, the Eye, Mordor and the fires of Mount Doom are prisms of the same symbol whose content includes the mother archetype, fate, fire, guilt, circle and center. Since the uroboric gathers everything into one, as it were, the masculine principle represented by Barad-dûr is also present. While Frodo’s fate has been to confront the mother archetype, Aragorn’s has been to confront the father archetype. The tyrannical father figure of Mordor is not prominent within Mordor itself because the uroboros is primarily the core of the Terrible Mother – the "original" mother archetype – whereas this energy has instead manifested outside Mordor in Aragorn’s world, most notably with Orthanc/Saruman and Minas Tirith/Denethor. We know that the Dark Tower rises within Mordor but Frodo has not even seen it yet – it is as if it does not exist while Frodo wanders, stumbles and crawls toward Mount Doom. But since this is the uroboros, after all, everything is interconnected, which means that the destruction of the Ring also destroys Sauron and the tower (from Frodo's personal perspective, which we will return to). Thus Sauron ”is” the Ring; one could say that Frodo carries Sauron, the collective shadow.
Tolkien likens the mountain to a giant furnace as early as when Frodo and Sam first enter Mordor and thereafter he simply calls it “furnaces” repeatedly. Within the mountain there is a creative fire, in other words – a giant hearth at the center of the earth (“The mercurial fire is found in the ’centre of the earth’”[20]); an explicit image of the Great Mother, even the Great Womb. In this hot, enclosed interior the masculine impulse represented by Sauron gave rise to conception, creation. That which is born is thus the Ring – the offspring of the uroboros that a human can carry (the “small”) which fills him with archetypal energy (inflation) and risks devouring him (the “large”). The Ring thus represents the mother archetype which is everything – while this uroboros is simultaneously “nothing.” In a correspondingly paradoxical way fire is that which creates but also that which destroys. (We have previously had reason to compare this to Kali, “the beautiful, horrible, wonderful, life-giving, life-taking Mother.”[21]) The furnace is a symbol of purification and transformation. It is significant that Tolkien does not use the word “volcano” for Mount Doom in the tale. By the Elves the mountain is called Orodruin, “burning mountain.” In the story when Frodo reaches Mordor the fire-mountain is as mentioned called “furnaces.” The tale thus seeks to describe the mountain as a furnace rather than a volcano which of course means that Mount Doom shares the symbolism of the furnace. The furnace is like the alchemists’ vas a vessel of transformation, given heat; as a transforming vessel it is of course a pronounced mother symbol. The Mount Doom that Frodo approaches is not “a volcano” but the transforming fire of the mother archetype at the center of the world – and it is naturally he himself who is to undergo the transformation.
When they have begun their ascent of the mountain's slope, Sam discovers a path. It is "Sauron's road from Barad-dûr to Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire," we are told. When the road reaches Mount Doom, it circles it like a spiral, as if to underscore the symbols we have previously discussed. But not even Sam can endure any longer. He lies down to rest. But then he is seized by a sense of urgency: "It was almost as if someone had called to him: 'Now, now, or it will be too late!'" We recognize this voice from Frodo’s experiences, which we have discussed before, but now the voice reaches Sam; presumably, Frodo has figuratively sunk so deep into the underworld by this point that he can no longer hear it himself. This summons to Sam has its narrative explanations – King Elessar has reached the Black Gate – but we still wish to emphasize the symbolism of urgency. That there is haste, that one must act now according to a dream, for example, symbolizes necessity more than anything else. The urgency becomes a compulsion – it is now or never, one has no choice. The hobbits must continue; if they rest, something critical will be lost. What expresses this better than a race against time?
”Inch by inch, like small insects, they crept up the slope.” To crawl like an insect, as we know, indicates that the creature has succumbed, is succumbing, or risks succumbing to the Terrible Mother. The pressure becomes substantial on Her mountain at the center of the world. Then Frodo suddenly sees Barad-dûr; the veils part for a moment. He sees the Black Tower for the first time as he makes his way up Mount Doom – two symbols which, as we have just learned, are connected by a road. One might speculate that this is a literal illustration of how these landmarks are like prisms for the same uroboros symbol we touched upon earlier. This fleeting vision causes Frodo to collapse; the pressure doubles with this sight as the veils are parted. Sam carries him once more, along the path up the mountain
Our discussion of Mount Doom – and Frodo’s final ordeal – continues in the next comment.