The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?...Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn't that what makes a man?
-The Big Lebowski, 1998
Lately I have been reading a lot of Dion Fortune, one of an astonishing number of powerful pre-feminist women in the Western esoteric tradition. Fortune was a psychotherapist as well as an occultist -- this was in the early days of psychotherapy, when there was no licensing, few professional standards, and when it was nearly de rigeur to sleep with one's patients. (Fortune, known as a prig in the relatively libertine circles of occultism, would never have crossed this line, but her contemporary Anais Nin certainly did.)
Like the more famous analyst Carl Jung, Fortune found psychological insight in the fairy tales of Western culture. One of these that fascinated Fortune, and many others before and after her, was the concept of the changeling.
As the stories went -- and they were common all over Europe for centuries -- a normal human baby could be stolen from its crib in the middle of the night by fairies or goblins, only to be replaced with a monstrous double of non-human origin. One could sometimes tell a changeling by its unusually thick head of hair, its enormous appetite, or the greenish tint of its skin. Sometimes, one might get one's real child returned by beating the changeling with a stick.
Modern interpreters believe that changeling stories were a medieval attempt to explain deformities or developmental delays in human children. But, as Fortune herself often lamented, modern academia too frequently gives our forebears short shrift when it comes to subtlety and common sense. The descriptions of changelings are actually quite consistent and precise, and they do not sound like either mental retardation or deformity, two conditions of which agricultural Europe was certainly already aware. What on earth were these stories really about?
In her own day, Fortune observed certain people who, as she wrote in her book Psychic Self-Defense, "might well be described as non-human, soulless, in that the ordinary human motives are not operative with them, nor do the ordinary human feelings prompt or inhibit them...Gratitude, compassion, good faith, morality and common honesty are utterly foreign to their natures." Fortune identified such individuals with the changeling phenomenon.
In the modern day, as her biographer Alan Richardson smugly points out, we call these people sociopaths. But in Fortune's time they knew of sociopaths by a clinical name as well ("moral insanity," which I rather like) and the well-read Dion would no doubt would have known this.
We no longer suppose that people can be literally switched at birth with a monster child, but we have not come up with any better ideas about why sociopaths are the way they are. And the more we look for them, the more of them we find hiding among us. Contemporary books such as The Sociopath Next Door suggest that as many as one in every 25 people may lack normal human empathy for the suffering of others.
At the end of August, our country quietly sentenced Joseph Edward Duncan III, one of the worst sociopaths and serial killers of modern times, to death. I will stay away from the details of Duncan's crimes as much as possible in this post; suffice it to say that he is a killer of children. If one doesn't already know what he did, it is better not to know.
Endlessly fascinated by himself, Duncan kept several journals, both on and offline. In one, he whined, "I have no feelings for my victims, and I never will. But I do have feelings, very real feelings." I am inclined to believe this. On some level, Duncan understood that he was, in some way, fundamentally different than other people and every now and then, one can see him trying to wrestle with this in his writing.
What made him like this? Duncan's childhood was not enviable, but many others have suffered much worse and gone on to lead exemplary lives. If it is something in the circuitry of the brain, it is a process we do not understand. Psychology has no answers, only classifications.
Duncan himself believed that he was infested with demons, even at one point channeling the devil. "The devil is here, boy, the devil himself," he told one of his victims in a videotape confiscated by police. "The demon couldn't do what the devil sent him to do, so the devil came himself!"
"The devil made me do it" excuse is older than the hills, and lame. There's no doubt that letting "the devil" take him over gave Duncan "permission" to do what he really wanted to do anyway. "The devil" is only another part of Duncan, as he is part of me and Norman Mailer and my cat and Sarah Palin.
To paraphrase Lon Milo Duquette, one of the finest occult authors of our day: everything we can perceive is really part of us -- we're just a heck of a lot bigger than we think we are. It makes sense, then, to look at the sociopaths among us as changelings of a sort, people for whom the wrong part of the psyche is behind the wheel. Who made the switch? And how does one push the devil out of the driver's seat, once he has taken over? Nobody knows how.
For years, Joseph Edward Duncan III was a poster child for prison rehabilitation. Several wealthy men lobbied hard for his early release and offered to put him up in their own homes, among their own children. (Wisely, the state said no.) But Duncan was eventually released. Went to school, got a good job working with computers, "journaled" about his demons.
Then he went on a killing spree.
The state will kill Duncan, just like monsters in fairy tales are always slain. But even with his killing, there will be no sense that evil has been eradicated.
Dion Fortune got out of the psychoanalysis business pretty quickly, writing that "I had very little success in alleviating human misery, and this was a thing for which I was sincerely concerned; it made me genuinely unhappy when I saw cases drag on and spend their little all in the hope of a cure of which I knew there was no prospect."
